Scary theory about aliens (pt 2) 

The most sensible explanation as to why we haven't found aliens is because they're too far away from us

alternate theory, we aren't intelligent enough yet to find other intelligence.

Or all the aliens realize that you should not broadcast your position to the universe. It invites invaders.

Microbes are unaware of us, but we exist. To a sufficiently advanced being we would be the microbes.

Another possibility is that aliens have rules similar to Star Trek’s prime directive. Meaning they can only observe without interfering in our development in any way.

Time is probably the most important obstacle. Humanity has existed for small fraction of universal blink of the eye. We have been able to observe the universe for far shorter time than that. We could be ahead of the others or others are already on a level far beyond our ability understand.

Saying there are no aliens, is like dipping a cup into the ocean, seeing no fish in the cup, and claiming the ocean is fishless.

George Carlin nailed it. He described ALL our dysfunctionality and asked "Cant' you just see how eager the rest of the universe is for US to show up?"

I heard a great explanation for this which is slightly comforting and slightly scary. If the universe was an ocean, we have only sampled a 12 ounce glassful of water from it. The likelihood of finding a fish in the glass is next to none, but it would be rash to conclude that there are no fish in the ocean. Going further, that glass of ocean water most likely has some types of bacteria that isnt visible to the naked eye, only able to bee seen under a microscope. Maybe we just dont have a strong enough stellar microscope to find life where it otherwise appears to not exist. Just some food for thought 😊

The reason we havent found aliens is because we not only havent exited the solar system, we have barely explored what lies within it.

Imagine aliens treat us like we treat some indigenous tribe that are still "isolated"

If I was a smart alien, I wouldn't want to talk to us either.

We're probably the intelligent lifeform equivalent of a drunk creep - everyone hears us yelling but they're dodging us cause who'd wanna talk with such a freakin liability?

My favorite will always be the dark forest theory: Aliens are smart to stay hidden because everything living thing in the universe is aggressive and we’re the only ones naive enough to call attention to ourselves

They were looking for intelligent life , they just didn't find it here

i just had a really in depth convo with my dad about this and we came up with a theory that the three main filters would be undesirable stellar conditions (aka fast star extinction), the development of complex consciousness, and a species own greed and lack of foresight (like humans have)

GREED is our final human filter.

"Sometimes i think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." - calvin, _calvin & hobbes_

My theory is that aliens either aren't near our level of intelligence, or on a completely different plane of existence. Like the 4th dimension. They'd be able to observe us uninterrupted, but we literally cannot comprehend or recognize their presence

I'm not worried about intelligent life in the universe, I'm still searching for intelligent life on Earth.

If smart aliens exist, they would certainly stay the hell away from us.

An alternate also scary theory is the dark forest theory. Where the ones who make noise don't survive. In which case its not even a filter we can pass or have passed, its already too late.

i find this theory really interesting: it’s been suggested that the reason we have no evidence of intelligence beyond our planet is not the vast distances but the brief blip of time intelligence exists before destroying itself isn’t long enough for two distinct space-faring cultures to interact.

My favorite explanation for why we haven't found aliens is that, we're just early. It took billions of years for life to go from single celled to multi celled, and even more for complex life as we know it. So most aliens might just be single celled life in an ocean, and we're just early to the party :]

The most logical theory to me is that you simply can't surpass the light barrier, so no intelligent race *could* contact each other unless they arose REALLY close to each other. Surprised no one has talked about that possibility yet.

Honestly I think the filter being is killing ourselves is pretty accurate.

Next month: Aliens work for Red Bull F1.

We are the annoying younger sibling that the older siblings hide in their rooms from.

The universe is so insanely huge, there could be multiple intelligent lifeforms on various planets but they are all simply too far from each other to ever communicate effectively.

I think the reason we haven't found aliens is because all the aliens agreed not to contact us until we get to their level.

I think the one's we're considering to be 'Aliens' are actually future humans, traveling back in time to see and study how things are in THIS time and figure out how they can either save a disaster from happening or rejuvenate the planet from what it might become.

So basically we haven’t found aliens bc we haven’t passed the final cannon event

The best proof that intelligent life exists outside our planet is that they haven’t bothered to contact us.

My belief is that the first thing a civilization does after they develop technology and space flight is make a lot of noise trying to find others like them. Assuming they survive that moment, the second thing they do is hide because drawing attention to yourself as a new spacefaring race is a bad idea because not everyone is 'nice'.

What makes sense for me the most is that even if there are aliens out there they would have to be far far away and the nearest possible ones would look at our Earth through all those light years and still see dinosaurs roaming around :)

Maybe the great filter is a simple physics limitation like a limit to the speed we can travel (light speed? or less?). If the nearest civilization is a 100 year trip each way, what is the value in making the trip besides purely exploratory especially considering it's a 200 year round trip. Even trying to communicate back to Earth can only move at light speed.

I think we're just too small. Like, Honey I shrunk the kids.

I have heard another theory from scientists. It is that the earlier universe was more chaotic, with massive star explosions etc., and it is only in the last few billion years that life has been able to evolve. Therefore, any other life out there is no more evolved than us or less.

A solution to the Fermi paradox is that we are first or one of the first. It took 4.5 billion years of general stability on a planet orbiting a stable, medium sized star, in the goldilocks zone for intelligent life to evolve. If thats a normal amount of time it takes for life to arise and become intelligent, thats a third of the age of the universe. Our sun will make the planet uninhabitable within 1 billion years. Thats a very small window with a lot of ways for it to go wrong, and theres only been so much time in which it could have happened elsewhere. Its not unrealistic to think that were just early to the party.

If WE are the height of intelligence, the universe is in a sad state.

Probably our concept of aliens is too limited for us to be able to recognize them if we do see them

That’s just a theory, a SPACE THEORY

Kurzgesagt has some great videos on the Great Filter, in addition to the Fermi Paradox and Dark Forest theories.

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." ~Arthur C Clarke

They're here (just ask the right people in the Pentagon)and they've been watching over us for a very long time, waiting for us to grow up before they formally introduce themselves...

Alternate theory: there are no aliens and we’re just trying very desperately to find something that doesn’t exist.

Well, to be honest I think: - If back to the beginning of life, there were not that much rules forcing lifeforms to take, maybe it'll be really different from what we thought. - Base on the previous assumption maybe we already saw life on other planets, just didn't realize, mistaken them for the nature of the planet. Advance lifeforms are really really difficult to emerge, or they didn't have enough time yet. - Maybe we are the first (at least in our observable universe), and also what we see might be a little outdated several billion years, so there are other life, just not that close. - Life is easy to emerge, just can't stabilize itself. If the first life on Earth was originated on Earth, it must be UNIQUE, the only kind. If there are no diversity, life quickly succumb when their surrounding changes. Remember when those first life on Earth almost kill itself because their affect on their surrounding? They should've died, how did they get the diversity to overcome that? Life might not be that simple and something has to happened at that moment that we still can't be sure at all. - This one is the most unlikely to has happened: They're advanced lifeforms, and we're COMPLETELY under control. They're so advanced that they didn't have to care that we're advancing at all, that we might have realized the fact that they are so much more advanced because we won't never ever stand a chance against them. They didn't let us see any other life yet, and maybe even don't care if we did if we found one. They wouldn't do this for slave, with their technology it's just not efficient enough. They might run us as an experiment, or to have a relatively diverse gene pool, etc... Or they're an all digital species that uploaded their minds to the clouds, and we are their live descendants. We are being kept to ensure if their system is being attacked or wiped out, we can stand back and doing it all over again. We don't know if it didn't happen yet, or already happened. But it's just a theory, humanity is getting awfully bad lately and need to fix our problems first. It doesn't matter if we don't survive, right?

Or maybe they just don’t want to talk to our self destructive asses.

One theory I have is that they’re so advanced that they don’t bother with us. When you cross paths with an ant hill, you don’t stop and communicate with them and wait for an answer. Humans are way beyond intelligent to communicate with ants. Same with aliens, we’re just tiny little micro organisms to them.

Any alien lifeform intelligent enough to travel through space, would probably find us boring

I think that Vargskelethor Joel’s Anti-Alien alarm being beamed out into space scared off all the duendes. No marcianito.

I'd honestly be embarrassed if extraterrestrials saw us at this point. It would be like having someone randomly drop by your home when you didn't get a chance to pick up yet 😅

The aliens feel we are too violent to approach us.

I think it’s funny to think about us finding other life, as if there isn’t a ton of other species here on earth we refuse to think of as alive. This used to extend to members of our own species. Humans couldn’t cope with an extraterrestrial species

Aliens be cringing at us rn

Another idea I heard was that there would be no way to know if we would be hostile to them (given our track record and overall love of violence, I wouldn't blame them for avoiding us 😬)

My favorite theory is one I heard from a teacher and it basically says that aliens might exist but we might not be able to find them because they have a completely different set of senses. This basically means that while we can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. The aliens might have other senses and not be detected by our five

If humans cooperate and combine our talents we can overcome any obstacle

I believe that the greatest proof that intelligent life exists outside our planet is the very fact that they have refused to contact us.

I've always more or less hocked the "Why haven't we found aliens yet" question up to the fact that the universe is an unimaginably big place, and that it'd be pretty wildly unlikely that two different planets would happen to form intelligent life that didn't come from the other one close enough together that we'd be able to perceive it any time soon

Maybe aliens think we’re just too dumb to talk to.

I'm a fan of the Dark Forest theory -- Every species shuts up because they're all scared of another species killing them.

i like the idea that our concept of what makes up life might be limited so we might not have recognized alien life when we saw it but this is a very sci-fi fantasy idea loll

"Human thought is so primitive, it's considered an infectious disease on some planets. " Agent K

There's a RU-vid channel by science fiction author John Michael Godier where he goes into loads of possible theoretical solutions for the Fermi paradox. Like, maybe aliens (if they exist) aren't allowed to contact us (like we have rules about contacting certain remote tribes), or maybe they are just observing us to see if we pose a threat to them (easier to send a probe first instead of an invading force), or maybe they only communicate using some physical mechanism that we haven't discovered yet, etc. Very interesting stuff

Magnetic field flip…it’s the reset button, coming soon to the globe we know and love.

Aliens watch us like we watch microbes

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying Arthur C. Clark. Black forrest is the most terrifying possibility imo

they exist but either we haven’t looked enough or they simply don’t want to contact us.

I think it's just that obligate sentience is such a rare set of circumstances that we're too infrequently occuring to meet another alien race until we go FTL if it's even possible. Everyone else that could be sentient is simply too far away in a universe that's quickly expanding.

This is why finding life on another planet, especially in our solar system would be very bad news for us, because that means life is common, so the great filter must be ahead of us.

Kurzgesagt in a nutshell had made a video about another theory as to why we haven't found aliens yet, the Dark Forest. It says that looking for aliens is actually a very bad idea (like preys searching for predators) and that the reson we haven't found one yet is because the aliens know this too. It sounds a lot scarier than planetary extinctions but at least it kind of solves Fermi's paradox.

Space is unfathomably huge. For example, since the invention of radio in the late 1800s, the furthest that any radio signal could have reached by now covers less than 1% of the Milky Way galaxy. And that's just our galaxy. There are approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each with a couple of hundred billion stars. 👀

Or, and hear me out, here, space is so big that the mere odds of humanity contacting extraterrestrial life are extraordinarily low🤔

I’ve been thinking ALOT about these things as well. Wish I had u to chat with about them

My theory is that aliens created us and have been regretting it ever since.

Me wandering in a desert wondering why I haven't seen any other humans yet:

I believe that the distances are just too far away. So we can’t find them and they can’t find us (yet) Our radio waves are not reaching even 200 lightyears now, it’s just a small bubble.

I like the idea that advanced civ capable of interplanetary travel would be advanced enough to reach a form of ‘enlightenment’ where they don’t see the value of interplanetary travel or dominion. That or they came and said ‘yeah nah there’s no intelligent life here. Next.’

We are a single spec of dust in the vast cosmos. However, we are, and that's enough.

For decades we have been shouting into the void. We finally got a response. "You're too loud. It's coming"

It's extremely ignorant to assume every other intelligent lifeform has to follow the same path as us in any way.

In terms of how old space is, modern humans have been around for a blip in time. Combine that with how long it takes light to travel from one end to the other and you have your answer.

I like Dr. Tyson's analogy... it's like taking a glass of sea water and looking inside and declaring " there are no whales" because there none in this sample of sea water.

It's interstellar dust. It makes it so that if you're traveling at even 1% the speed of light, your while craft will be significantly disintegrated by the time you've traveled just a few light years.

We haven't found life out there, but it has found us

A mundane theory is that other planets with life are water worlds, so any life there is not only harder to detect, but would also have a hard time traveling through space or sending a radio message. After all, dolphins have not mastered fire, so it isn’t surprising that they haven’t built blast furnaces or radio communications equipment.

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it kind of presupposes there is a viable and cost efficient way to achieve high level FTL space travel. Without a way around the light speed barrier, billions of high tech civilizations could be put there just in our own galaxy and we could easily never know.

It’s not a theory, it’s a hypothesis. It matters.

Perhaps we are like guppies oblivious to the fact that we are in a fish tank.

Kurzgesagt has a video about the great filter. They also have a video about how accidental destruction of satelites cause tons of high velocity space debris in orbit, which could theoretically become a huge obstacle for space travel. Effectively a cage billions of orbiting bullets. I believe in the combination of these videos: the great filter is the space debris any species create in the attempt to go interplanetary, trapping them until some natural or created disaster wipes them out.

Ian Morris’s five horsemen of the apocalypse

I wish that I had an extraterrestrial friend.

My theory is that aliens found a way to communicate to the universe but they didnt find ANY ways we are currently trying to communicate with

Don't forget the Fermi paradox and a potential predator civilization keeping everyone else out there quiet. Imagine Borg assimilating the galaxy while Earth floats ignorantly through space. Not knowing it's days are numbered.

Another equally scary idea is that society evolved to the point where realistic simulations exist that are so advanced and complete that you don’t know you are in a simulation much like someone in a large experiment may not know they are in an experiment as to not skew the results. Our simulation was just about how it works right now. We can’t even prove last Thursday, how do we prove we are the one true reality?

life is probably exceptionally rare in the universe and most of that life is probably simple microbial life. complex life is probably even more rare, intelligent life even more rare than that and intelligent life that develops some form of space travel/communication is probably so rare and so separated by both time and distance that we will never interact with eachother

The most likely reason is distance. Space is just that big. You could have 1000's of species as advanced as us or even slightly more so in our galaxy alone and there could still be thousands of lightyears between us. Just to put some numbers on this, if you assume the galaxy is completely flat (it's not) and a perfect disk (again it's not) to make the maths a bit easier then at a diameter of 100,000 light years it has an area of 25,000,000,000 ly^2 A civilisation such as ours that's been broadcasting into space for roughly 100 years has a 'footprint' of about 30,000 ly^2, you could fit over 800,000 such civlisations into our galaxy such that none would have yet detected another. The numbers will be different but the magnitudes will be broadly correct, meaning there could be literally 100s of 1000s of civilisations like ours that have no knowledge of the others existence, and that's just this galaxy, there are billions more!

I like to imagine that the new asteroid deterring system NASA did is a type of filter, if not a sub-filter. Like now we’ve begun to take steps and had progress in protecting ourselves from celestial bodies instead of depending on the other planets and orbital divergence in our solar system. It’s crude from the space lasers imagined in the 50’s but I consider it a huge step

If one cannot feel in their heart that there is already life beyond our planet and that we’re not being told, then we have already lost so much. Knowledge of something that most don’t know is power in itself. 💔