How could a universe be without advanced civilizations living on their home planets?

What if the drake equation is a trick question, in which we are the only pre-type I civilization in the universe. The drake equation is not false, because we are here on earth, and the answer will always be 1. However, there is no evidence for advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe.

With the great silence from 35 years of seti, no evidence of dyson spheres on Hubble’s telescope and Fermi's paradoxical question of "where are they," events, and time may be foretelling us something of our absolute loneliness in the universe.

With no evidence of probes in orbit or in our prehistoric past. - It appears that we have not been visited by advanced civilizations because we are freaks of nature, and there is no such thing as advanced civilizations in the universe, because we are it.

well who said that intelligent civilizations haven't sent back a signal yet? and it hasn't reach us? to many people are being optimistic about the SETI program.. the chances of making contact are slim, as been studied and debated for over 30 years.. i dont think you can expect anything just after 30 years of searching.

agreed!

Yes, we must keep searching.

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Bear in mind too, we are only able to 'see' the very local.
Even Hubble can only see so far... and the further out it looks, the longer that light has been traveling to us. Like looking bac in time.

Our own E.M. radiation barely makes it out past the outer fringe of the solar system. Even if someone is out there with a SETI of their own- they are not likely to pick up our E.M. any time soon. It would be extremely weak and degraded to the point of non existence before it reached the nearest star.

We can discover extra-solar planets, but only by measuring gravitational effects. Not direct observation. Most of the ones we have found are bigger than Jupiter.

So, realistically, at our current technology, the odds of us seeing anyone or being seen are actually very slim.

Yes, but this doesn't explain the Fermi paradox: if intelligent life is common, why they're not here? Assuming that none of the civilizations haven't decided to colonize the Milky Way over the billions of years when intelligent life has been possible is far-fetched. Interstellar distances and vast timespans are not a problem for a highly resilient or mechanical entities.

Either they don't exist, or we understand the advanced civilizations fundamentally wrong. I suspect the latter. No doubt that our view of how advanced civilizations ought to operate is hopelessly naive.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
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Well, I'd consider humans to be fairly intelligent, as life forms go, and interstellar distances look pretty challenging to me.

I could really misinterpret that

Maybe. But there are pretty severe limits to what we can "see" even in our neighborhood. Add to that the vast distances between galaxies and the vast number of galaxies... It's pretty danged unlikely that anyone is close enough for us to talk to.

Or maybe we just can't see them yet.
Let's be realistic about the sizes and distances and timeline that we are currently able to observe.

Right now, we can't even tell if there is life on Europa- and that's pretty close!

Over distances- we are looking back in time. Add to that, we may not see the machines or markers of an advanced civilization- even if it's only a few hundred light years away.

From Alpha Centuri, would an observer be able to tell if there was any life on Earth at all? Most likely not. We are tiny, our EM radiation barely significant if noticable-
Our machines in space would be as easy to spot as a molecule of oil in the ocean.

Good point.

Another good point.

I'm sure that somewhere out there, probably in our own galaxy, there are other intelligent beings who are saying the same thing - "there's nothing out there".

To a civilization just a little more advanced than us, from Alpha Centauri, Earth with its 21% O₂ atmosphere would stick out like a floodlit sign saying here is life!

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The fallacy of the SETI project is that we are searching for signals that we ourselves are unwilling to send out. Should the other civilizations be similarly inclined then no one will ever be heard.

You know, it could be just too soon.

We like to think the Universe has been around a long time, because it has as far as we're concerned. 13 billion years IS forever to humans. But the Universe is easily expected to get to be a trillion years old (1000 billion) and may reach 3 trillion (3 thousand billion!) before the laws of reality change markly from present day observation.

Anybody see what I'm getting at here?

Somebody has to be first. I know science has gone a long way to prove we are not "special" in the Universe.

What, we (the Universe where Spock is clean shaven) are just now getting into our third generation of stellar formation? I'll worry about the lack of other civilizations at around the 500 billion year mark. I bet we will be full then. And they will wonder who was first. And have absolutely no way of knowing it was us.

Just wait for it. I bet I'm right.

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...Assuming that's what their planet's life uses.

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No! I'm assuming that they have brains and know how to use them.

If we find a planet a similar percentage of chlorine or flouring, we will be just as certain that there is life there and for the same reason!

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Or that some other chemical process is at work. We can't jump to hasty conclusions, it's science, not blogging.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

This is basic chemistry. It is (more than) fairly well understood. Do you know what happens if you mix hydrogen and fluorine (in the dark, by the way) and expose it to direct sunlight?

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I've got a dollar that says you're wrong!

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The Brain Science Podcast

We have direct observations of some now. Look up brown dwarf on wikipedia, you'll be happy to see an image. Cool stuff.

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ROCK on!

I know what happens under Earth conditions.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Huh? We have different laws here?

You mix fluorine and hydrogen and expose it to the light of a G type star (any G type star) and it will go boom! If you use chlorine, you'd have to step up to an A type star to get the same result.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

We may be intelligent, but biologically resilient we are not.

Remember that other civilizations vastly older, and vastly more advanced. It is not difficult to imagine a genetically-engineered or mechanical entity that could travel interstellar distances that take thousands of years to complete. If one "hop" from a system to another takes, say, a ten thousand years the Milky Way could have been colonized ages ago.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
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Yes, to say we have limited observing abilities is quite an understatement.

Fermi's point is that if intelligent life is very common, and given the huge timespan our planet should have been colonized by aliens. The possibilities why that hasn't happened, are that (1) they all have decided not to become colonizers, (2) interstellar travel is impossible (unlikely) or (3) they don't exist.

At first thought (1) seems plausible since one would think that aliens are smart enough not to become invading pests. However only one invading civilization is enough to colonize the Milky Way throughly, in a small fraction of time it has existed.

"Non-intelligent" life is pretty invisible. Our stellar neighbors could have many planets full of dinosaurs and we couldn't know that.

Time isn't problem. The Milky Way has been here for over ten billion years, and conditions ready for intelligent life must have existed for a few billion years, when enough metals were produced by stars. From Fermi's point of view, somebody must have eventually come here and [insert the alien's planet name here]formed our planet.

Our radio-loud civilization has existed only a few decades. And interestingly, our "shout" is becoming weaker!

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Imagine that our civilization becomes a galactic empire of quadrillion or whatever citizens and which lasts of many million of years. That means we would be among the very first people that have existed. Which is incredible unlikely. Which means its unlikely that there would be no galactic empire. Or so the logic goes.

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You might be interested in this book by Stephen Webb. He introduces 50 different explanations for the Fermi paradox. Some are sensible, some are ludicrous. His own explanation is compelling, yet depressing. You can peek the book here.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Why should technologically advanced alien civilizations bother to transport their biological bodies all the way to other stars? If there are no worm holes or warp drives (or similar) interstellar travel still is veeeery resource consuming. And slow.

Like a snail about to cross the Sahara desert. Takes a lot of motivation.

An advanced technology could presumably rather easily find out about the Universe by other means: Superadvanced astronomical methods, superadvanced robotics with advanced AI or something else.
If they are at all interested in the Universe.

I think this expectation of aliens that travel around the galaxy is a matter of projecting our own features onto the aliens.

Agreed. I hope that is the reason for the silence and the solution for the Fermi paradox; that advanced civilizations do something we can't even possibly imagine.

The other obvious solution, that they don't exist is too depressing and is strongly against the Copernican principle.

Who knows? Energy shouldn't be problem to a highly advanced civilization. Especially if you don't need to travel fast.

No problem if you hardly notice a thousand years passing.

In an advanced civilization there's probably no distinction between an individual and a robot. Send a robot is the same as sending one of them.

If you're not interested in exploring, it is unlikely that you're interested in developing technology in the first place. The will of exploration must be one of the basic requirements for a civilization-building species.

The problem is, as I said, that even if aliens are not interested in interstellar travel it takes only one civilization to colonize the Galaxy. In a few million years, if they decide not to hurry.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

There may be a slight chance that of all the UFO sightings, 1 or 2 may have been sneak and peek of earth by a brackwell probe.

The Drake equation is for detecting other civilizations out there. However, "Civilization" is only a human term. Not all intelligent life requires, culture, song, dance and radio signals to thrive. An alien species with a society similar to ants could have or is colonizing half of the galaxy right now. They figured out how to build a rocket through a caste system and they've been building rockets and colonizing new worlds for milions of years now. They don't send out any signals to other aliens out there. How does that help them to survive?


Because the aliens on Alpha Centauri 2a are more interested in converted the abundant solar energy into biological energy as they are something similar to bacteria. Earth is flooding their world with radio signals. They don't care. They can't use that for energy.

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"Sending a robot is almost like sending one of them"

They could be nano-sized or otherwise very difficult to detect (and already here...).