pkt on Nostr: Aliens _might_ be everywhere. A sobering consequence of the Anthropic Principal is ...
Aliens _might_ be everywhere.
A sobering consequence of the Anthropic Principal is that intelligent life can be arbitrarily unlikely to evolve. It only has to happen once in the entire universe. So there is a good chance that we are completely alone. The one planet in the universe with intelligent life.
Also, the universe is really, really, big. With current technology nothing humans have ever transmitted – even intentionally – would be detectable beyond maybe 100 light years. Signals spread out and diminish as they travel outwards – even a perfectly focused laser will inherently diverge. There's only a few thousand stars within 100 light years. Even if life is common there's a good chance that not a single one of those stars has intelligent life for us to detect directly.
Our best shot at detecting intelligent life is probably going to be looking for atmospheric changes in distant planets. It's likely that other intelligent life will have gone through the same carbon economy that we are. Detecting fast changes in CO2 %'s in distant planets is plausible. But we'll need a _lot_ of planets to get lucky enough to catch one during their industrial revolution.
A sobering consequence of the Anthropic Principal is that intelligent life can be arbitrarily unlikely to evolve. It only has to happen once in the entire universe. So there is a good chance that we are completely alone. The one planet in the universe with intelligent life.
Also, the universe is really, really, big. With current technology nothing humans have ever transmitted – even intentionally – would be detectable beyond maybe 100 light years. Signals spread out and diminish as they travel outwards – even a perfectly focused laser will inherently diverge. There's only a few thousand stars within 100 light years. Even if life is common there's a good chance that not a single one of those stars has intelligent life for us to detect directly.
Our best shot at detecting intelligent life is probably going to be looking for atmospheric changes in distant planets. It's likely that other intelligent life will have gone through the same carbon economy that we are. Detecting fast changes in CO2 %'s in distant planets is plausible. But we'll need a _lot_ of planets to get lucky enough to catch one during their industrial revolution.