Fermi paradox

They're all hanging out at KIC8462852 apparently. We're rapidly reaching the point where "it's aliens" is the last hypothesis standing.

Maybe we're late to the party.

>>8929402
They realized that this universe was doomed because lossless transfer doesn't work (meaning they'd need to spend too much time fucking around with physics to avoid Heat Death) and fucked off to a universe that better suited them.

>>8929402
we're the first

>>8929402
They're probably there but not broadcasting radio waves into deep space.

Fermi paradox comes from the 60s when humans were exponentially increasing the strength and quantity of their radio broadcasts. Since the 90s it's been decreasing due to better radio technology and ground based communication infrastructure. It could be that civilizations typically only spend a century between building high powered radio transmitters then developing tech that makes it completely obsolete (or nuking themselves back to the stone age).

>>8929402
Very far away, in space or in time or in evolution or in technology.

using EM transmissions to communicate outside a solar system is impractical to impossible. intrasolar transmissions would not be powerful or focused enough in the right direction for someone light years away to hear.

there is no intelligent life, currently, with in a few dozen light years of the Earth. at least not one that can produce a powerful enough EM transmission and point it at the Earth.

everyone else is simply too far away and inverse square turns their signals into noise.

Maybe we are that guy who is never invited for the parties

There's no reason to think alien life exists, so there's no paradox.

>>8929417
>new happening just days ago
>scientists were described as "losing it" on Twitter
cautiously optimistic

>>8929402
>Where is everyone, /sci/?
And since there is nobody to be seen that should imply that the assumption
1) there are other intelligent species
is false.
But that is just the first obvious assumption, there are a lot more to be considered:
2) They consider space travel economically feasible and practical even if it takes millennia and huge amount of energy
3) They arrived here just now and not billions of years ago or they arrived here billions of years ago and left something durable enough to be recognized of alien origin
4) They are willing to be seen
You need only one of these to be false.

>>8929553
This

>>8929553

Or last.

>>8929553
>third generation stellar system
>we wuz first

>>8929402
This picture is incredibly stupid and ignores the rules of game theory and basic human behaviour.

Imagine there is an alien entity you know absolutely nothing about. Then your first goal should be to acuqire information about it, and not to try kill it off immediatelly.
What if they are super advanced and can easily stop the projectile?
What if they live in space habitates?
What if other alien entities are watching what you are doing to them?

In either of those cases, you would be fucked.

Also, apart from that, there would be simply no political will to kill every other intelligent civilization with relativistic projectiles.
It is hard enough to persuade people to pay more tax to fight climate change, do you really think people would agree to more tax to kill every other intelligent entity in the universe?

>>8930363
hard to develop a civilization based entierly on helium and hydrogen

>>8930363
Actually called the fieest generation because of the retarded historical naming scheme. Regardless,
>hydrogen-based life

>>8929402
Radio communication is very primitive for a civilization that has travel between the stars meaning they use a form of communication we have yet to discover, as for aliens on par with us radio waves(from technology) dont go too far away from their parent star meaning they cannot beam transmissions to us at all.

>>8930369
fuck off humans, we're full

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA

>>8930582
Metallicity can be detected even in early stars and the first generation of stars were short lived. I'm not arguing that BBN was enough for life just that enough star systems have existed that being first is unlikely.

>>8930724
So glad you posted Isaac, he has been a non-stop scourge of brain food for me going on weeks. This episode, dead aliens, and the new one about colonizing the moon are my favorites.

Everyone so far is wrong. The galactic order waits to contact a new civilization until after they have, on their own, managed to eradicate the intergalactic jew menace from their planet.

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>>8930911
>911
digits confirmed

>>8929553
>>8930363
I can get behind the "too many gamma ray bursts until now" meme to explain we're first desu, although I'm still more inclined for great filter(s) and just the sheer size of space preventing contact with some ayys (and that we're either first or totally screwed)

>>8929402
well first of all, if one day they come, we will know it not a turn of luck and some random wandering, because space travel consume a lot of fuel,

if EM transmission and intrasolar arent powerfull enough, why not use the fact that valkirye engine could be detected by them to say , we are here

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>>8931009
>great filter(s)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7NzjCmUf0

Has to be
>extremely
rare to pass that filter then. This video does kind of validate your second consideration (sheer size of space preventing contact), though, which I fully agree with.

>>8930724
Best channel

>>8931072
I think it's pretty possible filters can make life rare, what if bacteriophages didn't do a lysogenic cycle and keked life when it was unicellular? Hell, even our current socio-economic systems seem to be leaving us in a very fragile position. I wouldn't be surprised if industrial revolutions wiped out most sentient species

>>8931072
I think it's filters, too.

>Sentient life (prerequisite for any other filter)
>Basic environmental modification (fire/shelter)
>Agriculture
>Civilization
>Industrial revolution
>Nuclear revolution
>???
We don't know what the next filter is. I think it's
>Multiplanetary habitation

Since nuclear technology makes intrastellar travel a much more plausible feat, and no species is going to be around for more than a few million years if it's on a single planet. (At least, evolution doesn't seem to select the things hardy enough to survive longer for advanced intelligence)

So it's probably some mixture of
>Multiplanetary habitation
and
>Artificial Intelligence Revolution

That will mark the next filters we have to pass.

What are the chances alien life is humanoid?

What are the chances humans can breed with other humanoid lifeforms?

>>8931691
Extremely unlikely.

>>8930724
That was awesome. Also glad he suggests turning on the captions because I couldn't figure out what country he was from for at least a minute, then realized he was speaking American English

>>8931691
The first is significantly more likely than the second, but the first is incredibly slim.

>>8931691
If Star Trek is accurate 100%

>>8930097

Who needs space travel? EM signals are enough to detect an intelligent species.

>>8931271
>drawing any conclusions at all from set of size 1

>>8932595
There's plenty of ways for alien life to exist well before we did, even intelligently, without reaching the stars. Stephen Baxter (hard sci-fi writer) makes several.

Agriculture/civ/industry/nuclear are all required to start considering interplanetary travel.

Akind to planet earth, aliens are stuck in interstellar space traffic.

>>8929402
Fermi Paradox fails to account for pre-existing boundaries.
Humanity is well within the bounds of an exceedingly advanced, aggressive, territorial species.
They are completely uninterested in us, but will aggressively defend their territory if any other species tries to attack us.
We are an ant colony located in the middle of a massive military base. They do not care at all about us, but will get extremely aggressive to any who try and approach us.

Everyone is invisible to each other

>>8932714
Yes. If you want to talk stories or "what if", then sure. But we're talking our universe and as far as we know (which is admittedly close to nothing), we are alone. You don't know what the alien life would look and work life, so these "milestones" do not apply. They apply to life forms similiar to ours. If you want to talk stories, i can make up many life forms that wouldn't need any technology for interplanetary travel. But here, in reality, the fact is that we only know about us.

There's no easy way to leave one star system and colonize another. Any intelligent life probably never leaves the habitable zone of their host star.

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>>8932783
I like this, it's plausible. We'd have won the galactic lottery if that was true though.

>also having a big brother ayy lmao race that watches over us sounds adorable

But what if they one day decide we've advanced technologically too far and they decide we're a threat to them and it's time for culling?
Or what if (put your tinfoil hat on) they were the ones that uplifted us in the first place? Don't ask me why, that's what you need the tinfoil hat for. Social experiment? They need a trustworthy ally? They're fattening us up to eat later?

All ayylmaos congregate to a single ideal star system filled with multiple ring worlds once they reach a certain tech level so that they can all benefit from the system advantages of living relatively close together. It is similar to how most humans congregate to large cities on earth. Sure many will live in the galactic boondocks in isolation just like how many live in rural areas hear on earth but their numbers and reach is limited.

>>8931857
I don't think that's the issue. He's got such an unusual accent, and he also pronounces his "r"s as "w"s which doesn't help

>>8929402
Theres alot of Fermi filters to get through..

Cosmological Filters
Star formed outside of galactic habitable zone.
Lack of accretion disk prevented planet formation.
Cosmic background radiation too high.
System forms more than two stars.
Solar output is stable.
Planet is obliterated after formation.

Life Filters
Accretion disk is low in metallic content.
Planet outside of habitable zone.
Organic compounds fail to self-replicate.
Core is not geologically active.
System lacks Jovian planets.
Planet lacks atmosphere.
Planet lacks liquid water.
Planet is tidally locked with star.
Planet becomes ejected from system.
Extreme tidal effect.
Van-Allen radiation envelopment.

Sapience Filters
Planet lacks a large moon.
Planet lacks oxygen.
Life doesn't reproduce sexually.
Planet has no axial tilt.
Life never develops K-selection strategy.
Lifeforms lack sentience.
Lifeforms lack risk aversion.

Technological Filters
Planet is non-terrestrial.
Extremely Low-Gravity
Lifeforms lack dexterity in manipulation.
Planet lacks high-energy fuel reserves.
Lifeforms lack abstract, rational or inductive reasoning.
Lifeforms are not omnivorous.
Lifeforms are not social.
Lifeforms lack formal language.
Lifeforms are not predatory.
Societies lack agriculture.

Apocalyptic Filters
Massive extraterrestrial impact event.
Climate change. (Natural or Induced).
Gamma ray burst.
Food chain collapse.
Massive celestial body intrusion.
Rouge pulsar.
Galactic plane irradiation event.
Grey Goo sceneario
Matter-Antimatter anihilation.
Massive seismic disruption.
Evolutionary regression.
Orbital ejection of planet.
Extraterrestrial predation.

>>8929402
Anyone else like reading "Humanity, Fuck Yeah"? It's my guilty pleasure.

>>8931691
I'd say about 100% safe to assume that ayys has some sort of arm-like appendages (or had before they all became brains-in-jar lifeforms and do everything using specialized drones)
I give it 20% chance the have/had 2 legs, 2 arms and a head
0% chance of impregnating ayylien pussy

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>>8934051

Pets... for all we know they have been selectively breeding us for generations... not to eat us, or harm us, but because they think we are "cute". Compared to them we are relatively as smart as a cat is to us. They probably find our music to be enjoyable, all the other stuff we have ever accomplished to be trivial.

>>8934469
>lifeforms are not omnivorous
Why do you think this is a filter? I dont find it very hard to imagine a canivorous species forming a civilization based on animal husbandry.

It's easy really.
The amount of favorable factors to intelligent life to develop on this planet is through the roof.
Sure, we're catching up to the fact that stars without planets are just very rare happenings.
Most likely, life exists on a lot of them, but most likely unicellular stuff.
It's just fucking luck. Having that active core preventing death rays from reaching the surface + a large moon that stabilizes the rotation axis + more subtle factors.
It took billions of years for life to evolve from single cell to multi-cells.
Simple tards see god's hand in this. I say it's just that the conditions for intelligent life are fucking exigent. So in a universe that literally spawns billions of planetary systems by galaxy, we just happened to have a good one.

>>8934434
It's easy to look at images like this and thing "Oh man galaxies are so big, our's must be teaming with life".

But it's also horrifying looking at how large a galaxy is and thinking that life could be so rare it occurs on a level of something like once in every billion galaxies.

>>8934758
>humans are known as the artistic race across the galaxy
>they seem obsessed with physical beauty and perfection and as such their race and creations are usually very pleasant to look at
>even their ever blue ocean planet is breathtaking
>alien lifeforms enjoy watching us and our art on their devices in their free time

I kinda wanna read a novel about this. Expanding a bit more

>rarely humans are taken on spaceships and put in enclosures - more like zoos
>it's forbidden, but some members of alien races just can't help themselves
>outside the glass dome strange looking creatures are cheering and cooing at the two humans inside
>"What is wrong with these aliens?!"
>"....I think they want us to dance for them! hey man, what's your profession?"
>"college student. you?"
>"mechanic"
>"shiiiiiiiit we're fucked. What if they're going to eat us if they find out we can't actually--"
>"Be quiet for a second and let me think.... hm.. okay. You put your left hand on my hip, and"
>'You can't possibly be serious"
>"Just do it already! Do you have a death wish?! Good. Now, plaster smile on your face like you've just won the lottery and.... one two three, one two three, I'm not going to be eaten, I'm not going to be eaten"
>"dude, why are you the one leading?"
>"shut up"
>"you smell nice"
>"shut up, just shut up already, for the love of god"

>>8934888
sounds like a Kurt Vonnegut story, but more gay

>>8930369
>Imagine there is an alien entity you know absolutely nothing about. Then your first goal should be to acuqire information about it, and not to try kill it off immediatelly.

Imagine if Indians had watched the arrival of the first carriers of Smallpox. Let's say they have a remote idea that foreign entities can bring foreign diseases.

Would it have benefited them to stay and chat...or to simply arrow them to death?

>What if they are super advanced and can easily stop the projectile?

You have no idea what "super advanced" is. You're praying to God that they're cosmic adults, not children who have to follow the same laws of physics like everyone else.

>What if they live in space habitates?

You're making a lot of "what ifs" and ignoring the basic physics of what OP's image was talking about.

>What if other alien entities are watching what you are doing to them?

Current knowledge > the set of all possible conditions that could be in effect

Are you going to parse fucking infinity in that set or go off your current knowledge and understanding that even humans will kill each other preemptively and not for evil reasons?


>there would be simply no political will to kill every other intelligent civilization with relativistic projectiles.

You're assuming that we're going to be the same sheep and cows who support modern democracies. You can't assume the strategies of people who have engineered themselves to be stronger, faster, more aware, and vastly more intelligent.

Political will in the future = Sovereignty of individual units = unlimited lethality

EX: Ukraine gave up nukes in exchange for US promises. Ukraine gave up the ace in the hole for its national sovereignty. So Ukraine got invaded by an enemy that saw its weakness (Russia).

>>8934939
CONT.

The image had a bunch of good points I've never considered.

Funny enough, I think Arthur C. Clark (or Clark who encountered the notion of Von Neumann machines) already discovered the "best" solution for this deadly asymmetry of information.

Send observers around the universe so that you can spy on species. You might even help develop their evolution or alter their environment. There's a lot more possible "things" you could do with that but I don't have a handle on possible knowledge.

>>8934090
>tfw when we're galactic rednecks

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>>8934888
Well it explains the Fermi paradox and makes for a nice story... humans the galaxy's must sought after pets.
Humans... the Tribbles of the galaxy

C is the great filter

>>8934949
We should just own it and develop the galactic equivalent of a 1982 Dodge Ramcharger with a 440 big block v8 swapped in for interstellar transportation

Which would be a more mind-blowing discovery -- finding Aliums, or somehow getting data to find that there aren't any?

Why explore space if you can simulate the universe?

>>8935049
>Why explore space if you can simulate the universe?

This is a possible reason for the Fermi paradox.
Most species completely live their lives in virtual world. Everyone connected and communication with each other.
They plug in to the network, tune in the species and tune out the galaxy

>>8935048
Probably confirmed aliums. Humans have been operating under the assumption that we're the only intelligent/dominant species in the universe so far, so while confirming we're alone would be a huge deal, we would just keep doing what we're doing. First official, acknowledged contact with aliums would change the course of our history forever. I say official and acknowledged because despite the naysayers, there is credible evidence that we've had secret contact with extraterrestrials in the past. Humanity as a whole finding out aliens are real would affect everything we do

>>8935060
yeah, simulations are safer, less expensive and might even reproduce our current universe with 99.999% of accuracy, so no need to travel insane distances, just simulate and observe the simulated universe. If advanced enough, they might even observe themselves observing themselves observing themselves....

what if they are already here

>>8935049
You still need to run experiments on your base reality to acquire new knowledge.

A combination of both interstellar exploration and VR seems like a more solid existential security than staying on one planet and immersing yourself in VR.

Though if you mean for a race with a functional UtoE and absolute knowledge about how shit works, then yeah I'd imagine they fuck off to VR until the lights go out in our universe if they can't possibly just flee to another.

>>8935123
really made neurons fire

>>8935140
ayy y

>>8935134
>until the lights go out in our universe

A stable small red dwarf should have a lifetime of TRILLIONS of years

>>8935158
I know, but trillions of years =/= forever.

A society that's advanced to the point have having no existential threats beyond the fate of the universe would still come to a conclusion as to whether or not there's anything to do about it, even if it's not really a worry for an incomprehensibly long time.

>>8935167

After a while, when they have done/seen/experienced EVERYTHING, death is the final unknown

>>8929402
Even if alien life WAS to contact us, do you think we'd even be told? I find it unlikely

>>8935182
>Unknown
That's a romanticization an alien might not share; or if there is an unknown about it, a society so advanced it's making plans on the timescale of trillions of years would likely have found out already.

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>>8935349
>trillions of years
They would also be advanced so probably live life faster, far faster than our brains can follow.
So virtual number of years so large I do not have a name for it.

This leads to the idea that our reality is just a simulation for a super advanced being to "play" in. We have a "beginning" and a smallest scale lengths and time, and all energy/matter seems to follow predefined universal rules.

Lets us pray the creator did not leave any "bugs" in our universe simulation.

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>>8935371
>mfw thinking about bugs in our simulation

Any spacefaring civilization would have long outgrown conflict because you need cooperation and coexistence to get into space in the first place.

>>8934808
Once every billion galaxies is still 100 billion forms of life

>>8935079
What would honestly change?

It'd just be District 9

>>8934802
I guess he included hat because living off meat exclusively makes it hard to sustain large populations.
Not sure if a filter is supposed to make it impossible, just harder. So it would be possible but unlikely for a carnivore to develop large populations.

>>8934939
The rest of the posts is garbage but he's right about space habitat, and no the picture doesn't address that. You can move one quite easily, and if you lose one it's not a big deal. Space mining is kind of ridiculous when you're inside a gravity well, so they'd have other reasons to have them around. You can sustain far more people that way too.

>>8935406
They could be extremely ethnocentric. Lots of self sacrifice for their own species but too heel with these others. Take that to the extreme and you get the zurgs.

>>8931271
You're taking a very anthropocentric view of life here

>>8935785
Perhaps so. Still, tool manipulation and being able to move resources with your population are definitely prerequisites for interplanetary travel at the least.

>>8934802
> canivorous species forming a civilization based on animal husbandry.

That's more of a social animal vs solitary animal distinction. Lets say cats want to domesticate animals. Anti-social carnivores are all stick and no carrot. Its harder to domesticate animals when they are terrified of the master. Social animals know how to lull dumber animals into false senses of security. Its a cognitive difference.

>>8935592
This is closer to the mark about non-omnivorous species.

Diversification of diet makes a species more likely to survive climate shifts and food chain collapses. In addition, omnivorous creatures have a better ability to distinguish between different colors, scents and shapes. In increase in sensory input related foraging. Add to that the omnivores need to remember more detailed information about eating habits. This selects brains with larger memory storage.

>>8934051
>Or what if (put your tinfoil hat on) they were the ones that uplifted us in the first place?

It'll be like first contact between primitive tribea nd the western world. Humanity would form a cargo cult around the aliens and subscribe to their vision of how culture should be. Many would emulate it and collaborate.

As for the reason they would be on earth it would be to assimilate genetic data or to use earth as a strategic position.

Those are the only unique resources we have.

the odds are in your favour if you want "life" somewhere else in the universe

it is almost completely certain that there is other complex life out there. at what stage is anybodies guess. for hundreds of millions of years earth was just plants and bacteria, then eventually animals for untold millenia

perhaps there is a human-like civilization a trillion light years away that we will literally never have contact with. perhaps there is a planet with a lake full of plankton or other goo that is "alive" but will not be a good friend for 100,000,000 more years

if you want to see aliens you will have to assume that they are so far advanced that space travel is easy enough to travel to a completely inferior race for no reason, and that they would have something to gain for contacting us

no point in going to a planet for resources if it's covered in other shit, there are billions of dead planets loaded to the core with rare minerals and gas pockets, if they wanted what we had it wouldnt be worth it to go to war or obliterate us, unless they were comically evil with an agenda of "wipe out all life in the universe"

it's like needing a few rocks for your patio and digging up an anthill to get some. its just not worth the hassle

>tfw you will never go on a spice-fueled jihad to kill the universal jew
why live

>ayys help develop life on a planet
>slowly guide it along
>form planet as a "colony"
>use planet to strengthen its position politically
>armada of vote-farm planets give political hegemony to seeding planet
you are thinking like a brainlet, space is really one gigantic gerrymander

>>8935079
what events do you consider to be credible in terms of secret contact with aliens?

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>>8929402
>niggers trying to find civilizations that use smoke signals for transcontinental communications

>>8935167
You did, you poor sap. You said we had all the energy we needed, forever. You said 'forever.'"

"It was Adell's turn to be contrary. "Maybe we can build things up again someday," he said.

"Never."

"Why not? Someday."

"Never."

"Ask Multivac."

"You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dollars says it can't be done."

Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this: Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age?

Or maybe it could be put more simply like this: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of lights ceased, the distant sounds of clicking relays ended.

Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Isaac Asimov, The Last Question

multipass?

>>8936378
I've read an other story that essentially says the same thing.

But that's an equally anthropocentric sort of view because it's based on a very recent understanding of the far, far future. If it is the case, then the universe had a good run.

Otherwise I like to stick around with the Stephen Baxter flavor of hard sci-fi.

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so say you meet a alien what would you ask he/she/it/???/ ?

>>8929786
source?

>>8931271
>???
is obviously overpopulation/environmental damage

>>8937325
why did they bother coming.

any solar system with a decent amount of asteroids, comets, and a gas giant with moons, has all the resources and energy a civilization could want. building oneil cylinders is going to be easier than traveling through space. humans are far too stupid and dangerous.

>Venus has retrograde rotation
Something nasty hit it, didn't it?
Also, about that theorized impact that crated the moon through ejecta...

>>8929591
Fermi paradox has nothing to do with radio waves, not exclusively, anyway. If civilizations were reasonably common, you'd expect at least some of them to eventually blot out the galaxy with Dyson swarms in just hundreds of thousands of years from the first expansion into space.

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>>8937500
we humans dummy. its the next big thing

>>8936773
>baxter
>reading something about cool stuff like manned mission to titan expecting cool stuff about, well, manned mission to titan
>its actually a book about the evil military industrial complex
>and the evil republicans
>and christians
>oh and china is good too tehee
>btw here's a page about the space shuttle and how the evil general that lives in an obsolete damp nuclear bunker wanted it to have delta wings so its faster and riskier oh the usaf also tried to shoot one down during its ascent...

Never again. What a piece of shit.

>>8937562
>Hard sci-fi story
>Not picking at religion

I seldom see a story that doesn't; at best I've seen ones avoid it altogether. I personally have nothing against religions even if I personally haven't been converted to one.

Also it'd be foolish to think China isn't a superpower in the spacefaring future.

All that said, I agree that his books can be a bit too politically preachy. I like them for the technological speculation, not the politics.

>>8937520
venus has no moon, barely revolves, no rings, a fragile and thin crust, run away vulcanism, no magnetosphere, still about the size of earth.

>>8937569
Write a hard sci-fi story.

Make it about religion.

Hard mode: make it not anti-religious propaganda.

Nightmare mode: make it have believable and interesting characters.

>>8937575
I think you could reasonably make a hard sci-fi story about religion if you picked an Eastern one like Buddhism or Hinduism.
Christianity doesn't seem to lend itself well to hard sci-fi because the world is supposed to end according to the Christian faith (If I recall correctly, anyway; it's been a while).

So Baxter's stories (particularly the Xeelee Sequence where humanity and E.T life not only stick around for an indefinite period of time but manage to -- as a civilization -- outlive their home universe by fleeing to another, younger one before their own goes through heat death) takes place in a setting that debunks the entire endgame of Christianity; there was no rapture because people lived through all of time before the universe could no longer support life and it never happened.

>Some kind of ethereal form which grows by absorbing particles and doesn't need atmosphere to survive?

There's probably a billion ways that life could develop that we're not even able to speculate on at this point.

>>8937594
Well you don't have to assume that the religion is factually true in the setting to make it hard sci-fi, and neither do you have to assume that everyone would abandon christianity if the rapture doesn't happen as planned. People adapt to things, and seeing how people might adapt their traditions to reality (maybe even up to abandoning the faith en masse-- if handled well enough it wouldn't be propaganda necessarily) might be extremely interesting.

Seems like a story about the psychological impact that a religion might have on its followers over time would mostly write itself if you got a good idea to kick it off.

>>8937599
The only thing we need to assume is that it has to be a pattern that can replicate itself with some degree of fidelity, well enough that its offspring are very certainly its own, but maybe not so precise as to preclude the potential to adapt. This is why life on our planet developed sexual reproduction.

Massless particles *probably* can't do it, as they don't hang around long enough to really allow patterns to form (except maybe by some kind of deep-time causality thing). So we've got that much at least.

So, just spitballing here, patterns of sound resonance in cave systems might do, I remember reading something about how metal in space tends to form little sharp dendrite-things on it that wreaked havoc on early space vehicles by causing short circuits, maybe something could use those as its "metabolism", obviously computers have been done to death.

>>8937604
That's true, but Baxter seems to write settings where the timescales are so large that some religions are pretty much falsified by it, particularly Christianity.

I agree that you could make an interesting story out of it; but if you don't find any part of your religion to be factually true, are you even an adherent to it?

>>8929402
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJONS7sqi0o

>>8938191
Also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAU9ofjcx-Y
I meant to do this one, honestly.

>>8930724
What the fuck is up with this guys voice? It's so hard to listen to, what the fuck is that accent?

solar panels will ruin man kind
I repeat....
photosynthesis doomed the evolution of the ones who developed it, they never got an incentive to evolve movement, intelligence or anything alike now they live rooted to the ground doing nothing more than be it

>>8938257

Now I want to write a sci-fi story about space-faring race of plant-based beings

>>8938257

Well, there are fly-traps with rudimentary movement. I guess that could be a start.

>>8929402
They're hiding in Uranus.

>>8937594
Wing Commander.

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>>8937604
>>8937594
It's like no one's read Dune.

I know sure as fuck you guys are familiar with Warhammer 40K at least.

>>8937594
Literature is all about social commentary and opposing the religious dogma in society.

The idea of promoting it instead is plain silly unless you are being paid to by some church in which case that's just simple recruiting propaganda and nothing more.

>>8938832
>Literature is all about social commentary and opposing the religious dogma in society.

Yeah, if you limit the definition to marxist literature.

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>>8931691
breed? no.
mutually stimulate evolutionary pressured reproductive pleasure systems as an intimate social bonding exercise and joysource? yes.

>>8934808
>some fugly lump of ferrous metal, silicates, and steam managed to accidentally create patterns and systems so beautiful people swear a magic man created it all
>nowhere else in the whole basket could anything else like this occur

>>8934434
who took this pic?

>>8929402
The galaxy is big, and energy is finite.
They are probably either content, dead, on their way, or didn't deem our star system valuable enough to physically visit.

>>8938850
>mutually
Cuck.

The only reason to have alien slaves is for sex salves.

>>8937325
Did you kill off your commies, or did you self exile to save yourselves?
If the first, then please tell me how you managed to keep them dead.

>>8929402
>pic related
Whipple shields.
The answer is always whipple shields.

>>8938257
If we could pull rare-earth metals from the air like plants can do with carbon dioxide then you might be correct.

>>8929402
Chances of life might be low but chances of intelligent life capable of space travel I think is even lower.
If earth is any indicator they probably got nukes and have had an attempted genocide before they could even reach their moon so I also think you have to factor in genocide and all the other struggles were going through

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My two favorite solutions (beyond the easy cop-out: complex life is just rare AF and we're out in the boonies), are:

1) The Great Filter is merely the need to abandon the biological drive for infinite growth. Failure to do so means you'll likely exhaust your planetary biosphere before you become space faring. Biological immortality may oft come before space faring technology (and is more or less required for it, in a non-FTL verse), so that alone would force a population cap. If you have such a cap, once you've colonized a few systems, expanding more in the same galaxy cannot further ensure your species's survival. As you've no need for superstructures to power such small scale civilizations, those colonies you do have will probably have a small footprint, pretty much invisible to modern technology even if they happen to be nearby.

(And if that sounds too much like hippie talk.)

2) The Great Filter is the realization that the universe is doomed. Every civilization that builds a large enough particle collider to measure the top quark realizes we live in a False Vacuum, and the whole of reality could be reduced to hydrogen gas at any moment as a result. As soon as this is discovered, they build another even larger collider to create their own universe and (somehow) slip into it. Or, being immortal and extremely forward thinking, sink themselves inside the event horizon of a particularly large black hole to buy themselves more time.

Would be nice if they left a note for the rest of us though.

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>>8931691
Not very likely.

Any intelligent life must likely have:

1. A hardened brain case or exoskeleton. If intelligence is an evolutionary asset in a certain environment then the brain or its analogue is worth protecting.

2. Some sort of appendage (hands, beak, trunk, tentacles, antennae, etc) that allows fine manipulation of objects, necessary to develop tools.

3. Some form of terrestrial locomotion to allow the development of fire.

None of these three premises needs a humanoid shape.

This, for example, is an imagined form of a sentient "dinosauroid", had the K-T extinction event never happened. It's one of the most realistic and creative sentient "alien" species designs I found on the net, speculative evolution at its finest.

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>>8931691
>>8939630

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>>8931691
>>8939630
>>8939632

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>>8939630
>>8939632
>>8939635

>>8937570

Venus was almost certainly hit by a similar size of planet as Earth was - but where Earth ended up with a moon, Venus had its rotation nearly cancelled out.

>>8939611
IIRC False Vacuum has no legs to stand on in terms of being a valid possible state for our universe.

I agree with your first point, though. Without FTL travel, species more likely than not become biologically/digitally immortal and spend the rest of their time with dealing with point 2 if they can.

I just don't think we live in a false vacuum. Even if we don't, current humanity expects a big freeze and working with no further speculated cosmological knowledge, a sufficiently advanced civilization would still try to either slip into another universe or fuck off to a black hole to bide time.

Currently I don't think there's any scientific consideration that you can enter a new universe even if you created it, but I don't know if string theory says anything about it.

Humans have only very recently started looking into biological immortality, so we've got a while before we've even finished point 1.

Though that begs the question: If it is possible to enter new universes to escape your own being doomed, isn't it almost inevitably likely that we would have encountered refugees from another universe ourselves? But perhaps they are just outside of our visible range of the Universe. Unless universes can naturally occur or ours was created and deemed unsuitable for use by those that developed it. Or we're the first universe, or too new for any civilization to have had any use for it at the time.

That's the thing about trying to think on timescales so far ahead or behind us. It gets into baseless speculation. Perhaps the answer to the fermi paradox is that universes are inherently inescapably doomed (thus we don't get refugees). Or perhaps there's literally an infinite amount of them, and as such, there's no reason for anyone to visit our universe, which might be a shitty one for alien life operating with different laws of physics. Or maybe they aren't here yet. Or already were and left again.

No telling which is the case, but maybe humans will find out.

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>>8929402
They all invented a 4chan and are spending all their time shitposting.
>tfw this is how the world ends

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>>8939630
>>8939632
>>8939635
>>8939636

>>8939639
>IIRC False Vacuum has no legs to stand on in terms of being a valid possible state for our universe.
I'd like to read up on that, as last I heard, it was kinda 50/50. Just, not something worth worrying about when you canna do anything about it.

I could see sticking around for the bigfreeze+bigrip, or some other trillions year distant apocalypse, and hoping you worked up a solution before that distant era, but false vacuum can take you out at any given moment. Maybe even right n...

But yeah, while I've heard some fanciful ideas on how to spawn another universe, I've heard none on how to get from one to another. Pretty much anything goes in string theory, so that's neither here nor there. (Though I wouldn't expect refugees from that scenario - the idea would be that you create a more stable one.)

Black hole being another idea, but in addition to being risky, might not be possible either, given some noise barrier theories.

I think you're quite likely to hit biological immortality of one brand or another before you reach interstellar colonization capacity though. We're probably closer to extremely extended life times than we are to setting up interstellar colonies, and again, assuming FTL ain't a thing, one would pretty much require the other. So it seems, at least for any species like us, a population cap is inevitable.

>>8929402
I think it's almost guaranteed that life will form somewhere else in the universe but with almost the same level of certainty I think it's guaranteed we will never be aware of their existence

>>8929402

This smarmy Israeli thinks he's writing SUCH a true and SUCH a thought-provoking piece, and then right at the end, when he's supposed to be at his cutest and at his rhetorical best, he, a kike of all people, totally forgets that there is a Great Policeman In The Universe. And here, his argument falls apart.

>>8935042
hell yeah

>>8929702
Further pushing the "I am the universe" argument.

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>>8937325
Ask to teach us how to achieve Space Travel + a Course on their Science, Math, Engineering, Language, History & Medicine.

>>8938859
>>nowhere else in the whole basket could anything else like this occur

That's not a bad hypothesis, at least for anything more advance than a sponge. This universe is hostile to our form of life. It may be sheer luck that there is a planet that is habitable period.

>>8929402
As it turns out the chance of life occurring on a star system is less than 1/10^24.
Wow who knew it was so simple!

>>8939909
Given the number of different theories on how life may occur, most of which are still deemed possible, the fact that life isn't made up of any unusual elements, the fact that there's nothing remarkable about this solar system, and further, it isn't even of the type of solar system most likely to have habitable rocky planets for the lengthiest periods of time... This seems unlikely.

Though, some more reasonable number, that may put in every few hundred galaxies or such, would likely have the same effect for us.

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There's an infinite multiverse. Fine Tuning makes that pretty much the only reasonable explanation for our laws of physics.

Infinite multiverse allows humans to exist even if there are lots of filters.

There is other intelligent life out there (because of infinity) but it's too far away (many universes between us) and transportation between universes is not possible (there'd be infinite visitors all the time).

Yeah, I can't prove this, but I don't see it playing out any other way. Enjoy being alone in our universe for the rest of your days.