Latest Search For Alien Civilizations Looked At 60 Million Stars, Detects No Signals

https://www.iflscience.com ^ | 05 MAY 2021 | Staff

[cgbg]

we are as dumb as a sack of hammers

That is an easily defined term--any civilization that lives above ground and cannot successfully defend their planet against asteroid strikes is, by definition, dumb as a sack of hammers, and is not gonna last for long....

[rightwingcrazy]

Thanks; I learned something new.

The experimental results quoted in the Wikipedia article seem to suggest the most people want to think of themselves as more average than they are. Incompetent people judged themselves more competent, and competent people judged themselves less so. Blending in is a good survival strategy.

[Steely Tom]

I thought she was pretty foxy.

Also, that wireless (bluetooth?) earpiece is something else Gene Roddenberry got right. A little too big, but so were the memory sticks that Spock sometimes plugged into a computer terminal to check something.

[Ransomed]

Berserkers kill anything that makes itself known or something just points a gamma ray burst at the cockroaches when they get themselves noticed.

Or everyone invariably falls into a virtual reality hole when they become technologically advanced enough.

I once read a story with the premise that the aliens were shocked we created all these natural explanations for things like quasars and pulsars. “What do you mean you thought you were alone? Didn’t you see our beacons?!

Freegards

[Sirius Lee]

Maybe radio is a short lived technology as civilizations advance. The telegraph and smoke signals have largely fallen by the wayside. Quantum entanglement might render radio transmission as a thing of the past.

[Sir Bangaz Cracka]

“The Drake Equation includes 7 variables.”

************************************************************

Does one of the variables account solely for the length of time estimate for a lifeless inorganic speck to magically become alive? That one always stumps me...

[xp38]

Plan 9 was more real than we thought. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhvDMhrws1o

[Joe Brower]

No worries. We're Made Of Meat

[Ironfocus]

As soon as we find them the democrats will invite them to America and put them on government assistance.

[Red Badger]

In the Carl Sagan novel “Contact” (not the stupid movie), the aliens tell the earth visitors that quasars are them doing experiments on how to keep the universe from collapsing...................

[Red Badger]

And voter registration rolls...........(D) of course...............

[rightwingcrazy]

Yeah, it doesn’t seem to.

[Joe Brower]

"Or everyone invariably falls into a virtual reality hole when they become technologically advanced enough."

The Great Filter. When civilizations become technologically advanced enough to extinguish themselves, the vast majority do so. Humankind as a species has been at that point for over half a century, and the jury's still out on that one.

Those races that can surpass their animal origins and grow beyond themselves would advance to a point where they could easily keep themselves hidden. And probably do so. It's a jungle out there!

[Fungi]

Bingo!

[Ransomed]

No, it wasn’t that because I’ve never read Sagan’s fiction. I think it might have been John C Wright, who came around much later.

Freegards

[Ransomed]

It’s all conjecture when you have an example of exactly one to work with, namely us. It’s fun to speculate though.

I’m betting virtual reality just becomes too tempting to resist when it gets really good. I base this upon my scientific observations of people walking into traffic while looking at their phones.

Freegards

[Dilbert San Diego]

Maybe aliens don’t broadcast on the same frequencies we use.

Suppose you have an old fashioned AM transistor radio. It cannot pick up FM radio signals.

And this presupposes that aliens would use radio frequencies in the first place. Maybe advanced aliens communicate in some other manner that we can’t conceive of.

[cgbg]

Science fiction writers have done a lot of deep thinking on what advanced civilizations would be like, and there are some clear general patterns:

--Animal bodies = gone--too fragile, life span too short, risk of predators, etc etc

--Above ground or visible structures--gone--subject to surface weather, meteor strikes, hostile alien contact, etc etc

--Radio signals--long gone, discussed above...

Better possibilities: --Merging intelligence with the very large (planet, for example) or the very small (subatomic, for example)

--Communication through true "web" connecting individual minds--invisible, no radio signals--probably underground if physical infrastructure required

--Merger of intelligence with transportation, so "spaceships" would actually be some type of living entity

--Manipulation of space/time with wormholes or "gates" or some other to be discovered variation.

--Wide dispersion throughout galaxy so if one part was destroyed, the rest could learn and survive.

--Primitives like humans could be studied like we study animals. The best approach would be to disguise themselves as non-threatening, non-intelligent parts of the environment (trees, mountains, etc).

--Nanotechnology creates anything from anything without leaving a trace.

etc etc

[Verginius Rufus]

They should try looking at planets not stars.

Exactly.

And as long as they don't know we have chocolate, why would anyone out there be interested in contacting us?

[JamesP81]

They aren’t there.

Though I would point out that the galactic center is generally very radioactive. Not a hospitable place.