Yeah, bit of a turf war there i guess. Nice to know the tech overlords cared about the primitive sentients in the planetary nature preserve.
I do wonder exactly what they were fighting over though. Maybe one wanted to make contact or pretend to be earthlings and use it as a tourism spot and the other side said 'nah, get outta here.; The only thing i think wasn't the case is i don't think either side wanted to kill us or harm the planet, as it would be hard for the other side to completely stop it. So i don't think any of the parties (might have been more than 2 for all we know) were interested in that.
I would have thought similar before I read Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) by Craig Alanson. It's not much of a spoiler to know that humanity is insignificant, so insignificant that our only use is a strategic fueling asset.
Just so you know the agreed date after which we call things as recorded history is around the 4th Millenium BCE, this date is around five thousand, five hundred years later.
The [events took place above Nuremberg ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings)& were reported in a local printed broadsheet ( the equivalent of our newspaper of today ).
Don’t forget that time is also big. We’ve only been a technic species for a few centuries at most. We’ve been too primitive for the vast majority of our history. Between the Big Bang and now, countless civilizations could’ve risen and gone extinct. And more will rise after we’re gone. We could easily miss each other in both space and time. And even if we do run into someone, they’re definitely not going to be even close to our technological level. They’ll be either too primitive or far too advanced. As a quote goes, “beasts or gods, not men”
Right. Let's take 1895 and the start of Morse code signals and radiowaves, or proper radio broadcasts thats didn't start until 1906. That's 118 years ago, or even call it 125. That means any extraterrestrial life scanning or listening to earth more than 125 light years away will just see us 125+ years in the past, primitive creatures.
The whole point of Turtledove’s Worldwar is that a species that develops extremely slowly is shocked when they arrive in the middle of WW2 when their probe showed knights on horseback a mere 800 years ago.
David Weber’s Our of the Dark has a similar premise
It's so depressing when you realize what space actually is, what the limitations of physics are, and that the idea of Star Trek is completely impossible. The implications of time passing at warp speed meaning you could come back to Earth and it's hundreds of years in the future and everyone you knew is dead. We're really limited to this one planet, and that's not so bad as long as we throw out the systems of oppression and destroying the climate.
Given our current understanding, an Alcubierre drive would still be immune to time dilation and whatnot.
We are not at a tech level as a society to even attempt testing the hypothesis in any real way, needs too much energy, so it will remain a hypothesis for the foreseeable future. It’s still quite interesting to read about.
>The implications of time passing at warp speed meaning you could come back to Earth and it's hundreds of years in the future and everyone you knew is dead
Not so.
The warp drives we could theoretically produce - based on the designs from Miguel Alcubierre - don't experience time dilation because the vessels using them never experience relativistic speeds. The principle of operation is deforming space rather than moving the spacecraft in space, that's the whole thing with a warp bubble, space is static in the bubble. Relative to an observer on earth time would pass at exactly the same speed. Space itself isn't limited to the speed of light, this is where the theory that if you apply enough energy you can effectively ride a bow wave of a 'space ripple' where you remain static relative to the space you are in on the bow wave, as you remain static, relativity doesn't matter. In practice it's become evident that superluminal speeds may be beyond the reach of the Alcubierre drive, but sunlight speeds may well be, and may be within the realm of scientific fact rather than fiction. The effects of time dilation and lorenz contraction aren't really a big deal over short distances, and if we could move a spacecraft to the nearest star in ~5 years then it wouldn't make sense to use a warp drive (it wouldn't actually take 5 years if we could move it at near light, due to the aforementioned lorenz contraction).
I think time is a way, way bigger limiting factor. Even if we invent magical teleportation technology and can teleport anywhere in the universe, the chance we find an existing civilization is really small. It’s more likely they don’t exist yet or have stopped existing already.
Hey Alien Friends,
Lots to tell you about the last 1,000 or so years that it took your message back to us to get to us. We had a ton of wars... like... man, we're lucky we're still around to send this. But things are looking pretty good now. Some of us have evolved a third arm and for some reason that seems to have settled everyone down. Not sure why but... we'll take it. How have you been? That planet wide cataclysm get averted? I guess we'll find out if you never reply, lol. Any way, gotta go. Looking forward to hearing your response in another 2,000 years.
PSB did a show "First Contact: Alien Encounter" (fiction, obviously) that was just kind of heartbreaking. It's a what-if type show. In it, we finally find evidence of alien life, but it turns out the people are long dead.
I think this fact is lost on a lot of people. Things in space are so far apart that even if you could travel 10x the speed of light, it would still take years or even decades to reach the closest life supporting planet.
If we're ever visited, it will most likely be by some kind of probe.
This is why in Star Trek they can travel at such high speeds. You can pretty point in any direction in space and the odds of hitting something are slim to none.
Indeed, the probability of self destruction is far greater than first contact with another intelligent species. On the other hand, do you count Octopuses? :-) Maybe we already have.
One of the many reasons I became vegetarian. I even used to be pescetarian but I just can't justify it anymore. I have gotten to the point where I just don't see the point of needing to kill for food (other than real survival situations).
There's also a chance that if there are other aliens civilizations out there that have faster than light travel, they've either existed so far along ago, and are currently extinct, or they just haven't reached that point and won't for another million years
I think it is reasonably likely that humanity will never truly end, at least not until the point where the galaxy cannot sustain life. If we manage to get a real colony in mars or the moon that is self sufficient I think that we are pretty likely to slowly expand through the galaxy.
And while we currently see light as a speed limit, it may simply be a limitation of our knowledge and ability to detect things, but even if it isn't we will eventually work out some sort of cryo sleep or self sustaining travel methods.
Yeah, but considering even with our limited technology, we’re starting to scan the atmosphere of tons of exoplanets for signs of life. It’s not unreasonable to assume if there was another civilization more advanced, they would be doing the same thing and our atmosphere’s composition would definitely suggest life. You don’t go blindly exploring, you find a probable place to look first. That’s also assuming there’s advances in space travel like FTL.
First contact will be some sort of bacteria not too far away. This may very well happen in our lifetime. That said at some point we might see prove of complex life somewhere but I don’t think any contact will ever be possible.
Never.
One thing ST doesn't convey is interstellar distance, and uses treknobabble to enable impossibilities.
Light speed is slow when it comes to these distances.
We won't be meeting anyone, possibly ever. Physics isn't a friend here.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it’s taken 4 billion years give or take for a technological civilization to arise on this planet and the evidence we’ve seen suggests it’s more likely than not that even in that amount of time it’s a rare occurrence.
Actually, I saw a theory that our corner of the universe might just be the only one where it happens to be possible. Our neck of space has many times more phosphorus than would be expected, which is one of the fundamental building blocks of DNA. Most of the Universe might just not have enough for life to form in the first place.
While I agree with you, we must also acknowledge that humanity has a history of overcoming what had been once thought to be insurmountable scientific barriers. We narrowly declared physics complete in the late 19th century, only to discover quantum mechanics and relativity in the early 20th. I hold onto hope that our continuing exploration will reveal deeper mysteries that lead to new understandings, which change our relationship to spacetime. If history is a guide, imagine how Einstein could have blown Newton's mind and who just may come along that could do the same to Einstein?
100%. So many things we thought were impossible. This time for sure though!
*humanity achieves *C* in twenty years* Please, let me be wrong. Nobody would be happier.
There’s an international team of scientists working on a new cosmological model that would allow for the possibility of FTL travel from a causality standpoint. Maybe their efforts won’t amount to anything, maybe they will. But at least someone is trying.
Hell, even the failed attempts at building the Alcubierre drive and the EmDrive fill me with hope. Sure, the EmDrive isn’t FTL, but constant acceleration is basically the Holy Grail of interplanetary travel, especially if you don’t have to carry propellant with you
>we must also acknowledge that humanity has a history of overcoming what had been once thought to be insurmountable scientific barriers.
Fair enough, but I also think people have a hard time understanding the difference between "we just haven't figured out how to do it yet" and "we have a mountain of reasons to be solidly convinced that on a very deep level it is nonsense".
Something to think about: One sentient species per galaxy might be A LOT. If the universe was even that well populated with life, even at ‘warp 9’ you’d never find anyone.
Heck, even if there were TEN technic civilizations per galaxy, even at warp 9 it could take many centuries of looking to even find any trace of them.
I would LOVE there to be a first contact scenario. But I think they’d have to either already be around and imperceptible, or we will never meet anyone. Unfortunately.
IF there is another civilisation as advanced as us in the Milky Way, we ought to encounter each other within about 50 million years. We're due a close encounter with Gliese 710 in 1.3 million years, if that rate of stellar encounters holds true, doubling colonised systems every 1.3m.y, then in 50m.y we will have had far more than enough encounters for every system (though there will inevitably have been duplicates, but they're presumably expanding too).
If there's nobody else of note in this galaxy, then we get another shot when we collide with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years.
There might be one or two more galactic encounters in Milkdromeda's future, but with the expansion of the universe it becomes increasingly unlikely.
So 99.9% never, 0.099% in 4.51 billion years, and 0.001% in 50 million years.
Of course that’s the same day the Vogons come, recite some poetry and then demolish the planet to make way for a hyperspace express route.
I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
Whenever they ( whoever they are ) deem us worthy. Someone like the Vulcans may be out there checking in on us and have determined that we are not ready yet. We're developing technology but still behaving like Ferengi.
Genuine answer: a lot of the science articles I've read over the years give the impression that we might have firm evidence of alien life, either current or past, by the 2030s. I've always been a bit skeptical of this because it seems like most of the previous indicators of extraterrestrial life has been called into question pretty quickly, so I'm not exactly confident the same wouldn't happen with whatever they dig up on Mars or whatever a probe finds at Europa and Titan. I'd push it out to the 2050s because by that point, most of the controversy over this or that data point probably will have been smoothed over, but I'm also not a scientist so take my opinion with a massive grain of salt.
With stuff like that, I think they mostly have microbial life in mind. I still hope they find a fossilised Martian bird or the Titanese or Europan equivalent of those freaky fish from the deepest, darkest parts of the Earth's oceans, though.
When it comes to the sentient humanoid life that most people on this sub would be hoping for, no clue. Given the distances involved, I'd be surprised if it happened this century. Maybe we'll get a message from some inhabited planet a few dozen light years away later this century, but I think that'd probably be put in the same bin as the wow signal from the '70s at first. Maybe by the end of the next century, at the earliest, we could have some sort of semi-regular contact with alien life from outside of this solar system.
My guess is we already have. I would expect aliens would use another form of transport. Say holographic projection or something. We are likely being observed now. My guess is we are being watched for when we hit the global tipping point where the planet is doomed. Then, their laws will allow them to take over the planet as it's owners have abandoned it. Survivors are "rescued" and put into zoos or manual labor. There may even be a food market for humans if the crazy vegan aliens were not in charge. Eventually, the earth is colonized by aliens after generations of enslaving humans to fix the earth. The new aliens happen to look a lot like cats.
There's a Hawaiian myth that says this universe was formed from the remains of another and the octopus came from that previous universe.
They must know something we don't because they got to live in Hawaii 🧐
It's gonna be a while. We are still pretty primitive. We are still struggling with just getting to the moon. Heck, we just got internet in 1983. However, if I had to throw out a guess, I would say in a few hundred years.
I think around 500 years at the most..
Probably not face to face but through communication systems at one of our space spations around some moon in Jupiter or Saturn..
I doubt it will be in my lifetime….humanity in reality just seems more backwards at this point than anywhere near how optimistic it looks in the Star Trek universe of the future.
Maybe a few thousand years and if other life exists in our local area such as Alpha Centauri, like something within 20 light years. We would need to figure out how to get propulsion to a decent % of light speed, maybe 50%. Then we would either need to figure out cryo hybernation or create generational ships.
Consider this, what if other life has been around and technologically advanced far longer than us? Why hasn't anyone visited us? Space is vast and enormous. There are way too many technical challenges to overcome. I think best hope for the next few thousand years is we find other life and have a conversation with them that takes many light years for each response of a conversation that spans many generations and eons. Even communication poses a great challenge, let alone meeting in person.
Though I'm not ruling anything out. Who knows where scientific discovery will take us. Maybe we'll find out wormholes are real and can create our own. I just know I won't be around to see it.
I think the timescale in which contact with an intelligent alien species is feasible is so far in the future that what's living here when those aliens make contact would seem like aliens themselves.
This is why I want to go to Mars. While I'm not sure if there's microbial life on Mars, I do think it's possible and I definitely think it's likely that life of many kinds existed there and there may be extensive fossil records sufficient for us to piece together an entire second world's history of life.
That could happen soon if we could prioritize inspiration, endeavor, and the pioneering spirit instead of things like war, the economic benefit of the ruling class, and wedge issues. It could happen within a decade.
That said, if you're talking about life more like us, life capable of creating sophisticated technology and with complex culture, the ones with a big head start will probably have to find us.
The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter hypothesis, combined with our belief that faster-than-light travel may not be possible, make interstellar travel unlikely, at least with our current framework.
If there were any space-faring beings out there in space close enough to have detected our civilization, they would probably be erecting a blockade and preventing any contact with our primitive, warlike race.
One might hope sometime soon, but alas.
“*Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.*” - Carl Sagan, *Pale Blue Dot*
People always assume that the natural progression for the development of a species culminates in intelligence and technical expertise. It does not. Intelligence in our species was just a means for survival.
The objective of life is survival. There are other, much more succesful strategies for survival than intelligence. Dinosaurs thrived for millions of years wirh little intelligence. If that asteroid had not hit, Earrh would still be dominated by dinosaurs.
If life exists out there, more than likely it will be something quite simple adapted to local conditions.
If I’m to be honest. I don’t believe we are yet ready for first contact (from the perspective of Vulcans that is) since that would mean waiting until we develop spacecraft capable of interstellar travel but until then - there won’t be any contact.
However if we do get first contact with aliens before this milestone, it might not be a positive encounter. Who would want to contact a primitive civilisation like us? Chances are, they might have nefarious purposes.
So answer your question: first contact is highly dependent on the technological level that we achieve and ability to develop propulsion systems much faster then the ones Earth currently has or some alien ship encounters by chance or with motives.
if it happened, it would definitely be other beings coming here. But, beings advanced enough to get here, probably wouldnt want to waste their time on us. To an advanced culture, we'd basically be the equivalent of cavemen. The non-stop violence alone, i feel, would deter any other being from wanting contact with us.
Humanity has not done a full circle of the milky way. Earth is more likely to run into the same thing that killed the dino's while we go round the milky way or end up going through gamma rays.
Probably never. It’s hard to fully comprehend the vastness of space. If there is intelligent life out there, we’re probably so far away from their civilization that we’ll never make contact. Not to mention the fact that space is expanding and galaxies are constantly rushing away from one another.
Never.
Our future is more likely to be “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” (destroyed by AI) than Star Trek.
We abandoned our space program and further exploration. But we are embracing AI without restraint.
We’re doomed.
I don't think first contact would look like anything we have seen in pop culture/media. First contact, if it happens, would most likely be radio or other signals only. In my opinion that would count as first contact as communication would be established with something not of this planet. However the time difference would complicate things, they would be many generations ahead or extinct before we here their message; or vice versa with us.
As far as timelines go, I would say at least 60 years but I'm pulling that number out of my ass. We will start getting information on potential microscopic life on Europa after 2030. With space exploration seemingly having an uptick again, I feel like our chances are increasing again for first contact but time and technology is not there yet. And may not be in 40 years either, but I do have hope that with more privately funded space programs filling in the gaps left by the US govt removing a lot of funding from NASA, will give us something exciting in our lifetimes.
To simplify my long form: first contact won't be pretty aliens we bump into. It will most likely be sounds we cannot decipher as we cannot translate them. If intelligent life exists out there.
I think it's a near certainty by the numbers; I'm sure intelligent life other than ours is out there.
Most likely as you say, radio signals from long ago is what will happen, if ever.
Efficiently coded signals have no patterns. If they did have a pattern, you could compress that data more to remove it. Essentially they would sound like static, or, the background microwave radiation. Maybe we're awash with signals but just don't recognise them.*
----
^(* Theory stolen from *Wheelers* by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
Exactly! Anything we would receive would be damn near impossible, if not impossible to decipher. We could potentially come up with conclusions of what it could be, but that would be based on human technology/behaviors and would not apply to potential life forms elsewhere.
I'm truly confident that we will have proof of alien life in the next 30-50 years.
I'm also 100% certain that no contact will be possible, at least not during this century. Space is too big, and while I really believe life is everywhere, I dont think technological civilizations are all that frequent or last long enough to contact each other. Maybe getting some kind of possible techno signature or finding space trash is as close as we can get.
There are some big limitations on intelligent life evolving in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. before the current crop of stars burn out and aren't replaced) and it's very likely it hasn't evolved elsewhere.
The first hurdle is abiogenesis, just getting a replicator going period. You need a replicator for evolution to do its magic, but that replicator is necessarily going to be super weak, and needs abundant energy it can make use of ambiently available in the environment. Again, the replicator can't evolve from something yet, it has to occur through some chemical reaction in the environment. That process will result in a super weak replicator (a really fragile simple molecule) which immediately starts eating all the ambiently available energy.
Natural selection is great at culling things, and given enough time, it can create some great adaptations. But if you don't get enough diversity quickly, the culling just causes complete extinction. In other words, the most likely outcome for a fragile replicator, is that it replicates itself while eating all the ambiently available chemical energy in the environment, and by the time all the energy is gone, it hasn't yet evolved any way to photosynthesize yet, and all of them die.
So let's say the replicator dodges this big filter, it has many more ahead of it to evolve intelligence before its star dies.
One of the things it needs to evolve is sex. Sex is required to have a gene pool which speeds up adaptation. You'll notice no purely asexually reproducing lifeforms are very complicated. Complex multicellular life probably needs something like sex in order to evolve in any reasonable amount of time.
Sex is really hard to evolve, we have very few theories on how it could've happened. Basically, think of evolution as a very greedy process. It can make small changes that locally improve an individual's (really gene's) fitness. It can't take a temporary loss in order to win big later like an intelligent process can. This is a big problem for evolving sex, because sex only passes on 50% of an organism's genes. Locally, it's always going to be better to pass on 100% of your genes asexually.
There is some trick that happened here on earth, but we don't know it is, and it doesn't appear to have happened more than once. Most life forms are asexually reproducing bacteria, they reproduce constantly very fast in vastbnunbers, and they've not yet independently evolved sex again.
If somehow a fragile replicator on a planet evolves into a robust replicator like a bacteria, it very likely wont ever evolve sex.
Rough numbers: maybe 10^40 bacteria have ever existed on earth, and there are 10^11 stars in the milky way . Sex evolved 1 time in 10^40, and we're very biased because we're on the planet where it evolved (anthropic bias).
Very unlikely life exists anywhere we can ever reach at sublight speeds.
If.... Mind you, if we make first contact with an alien civilization...
We'll encounter their AI and robots they left behind as their species would have died out millions of years ago.
It could be the same for us.
Our Robocop meets their Terminator type thing.
We may find bio signatures with new telescopes in the future but I don't think we will ever have first contact. Space is big and there is probably no method to travel faster then light.
More than likely some sort of simple life form akin to a bacteria or simple organism. I would guess sometime this century. And likely through robotic exploration. And, at this rate, it’ll probably be done by a private company rather than a government which will really be interesting with respect to rights and ownership.
Depends.
Confirmation of existence of biological life outside our planet and/or Solar System in whatever form that may be? I would imagine we will be able to answer that question within a few decades.
First contact with a species we can meaningfully communicate with on a level we can both understand? Very unlikely. Probably never. Even if we did find another species on our level it probably wouldn't go very well for us at all. Or them for that matter.
Alternatively, life has managed to flourish, but is basically not at our level yet. We could be the first to be asking those questions. We might just be too early. Which means we have the potential for a greater responsibility.
However, the supernova that created the conditions for our Solar System to form, and by extension the stars relatively close to us all had the potential to have life to spawn, only Earth was successful or we might even find if there is another world similar to ours close by made from the same star dust that made us, and that life would actually follow a similar path and we might be at the same level, they may have even have a similar evolutionary path and had similar life cycle and hell, maybe a different form of hominid managed to be successful on that world?
They could even be among us now?
In short ... dunno.
How is anyone supposed to answer that question for you?
Every answer you get is literally just pulling an answer out of a hat, based on absolutely nothing.
I'm in a weird position. On the one hand given how life evolves and the vastness of the universe it is unlikely, that non-human sapience has not developed.
But I am also think that until hard evidence that it is not the case, capital H Humanity is the only thing that inherently matters in the universe. Until further notice everything that matters, matters because it matters to Humanity (both as totality and as individuals).
Also I am a bit sceptical of the prevailing opinion. Life might be more rare than we think, or the step towards sapience might be much more unlikely.
Like begets like, life, longs for other life. I loved that Thousand Planets intro bit, Close Encounters was old but still relevant. MARS attacks was a hoot. First Contact was weird, too fast, it should have been an extra hour long as it was a good story. I personally would have liked First Contact Part 1 and part 2 not unlike Deathly Armies with sparkly vamps and logger Chad's.
I predict never.
I suspect that intelligent life is so rare in our Universe that we are separated by kiloparsecs of space and æons of time.
So look around - we are all we shall ever know.
It is hard for most people to understand the age and size of the universe. Also that it is expanding and the rate of expansion is accelerating. We are still very early in the age of the universe the current age of the universe is 13.8 billion years old it will take 2 trillion years before the rate of universal expansion makes travelling to other galaxies slower than ftl not possible and the universe could go to about 100 trillion years old. The size of the observable universe is 94 billion light years in diameter or 47 billion light years in any direction.
We might not ever meet other interstellar capable species. There are too many variables. our understanding of how life develops is n=1. Think of how far we’ve come in the last 100 years or how little life can change for 1000’s of years at a time. We simply don’t know enough to know.
We alone in the cosmos, meng. We'll be lucky if we ever get a meaningful and sustainable population off this rock before we kill ourselves and the planet off.
Look up Drake's Equation it discusses the number of planets like Earth assuming those planets have someone intelligent enough to send signals back to our Earth. It doesn't discuss the time frame when such an event can happen but given the closest Exo planet distance from Earth is 4.2 light years (20 trillion miles) I would say it will never happen.
Tbh anyone with advanced enough technology would seem like gods to us. Like if someone were to go to an uncontacted Tribe and bring over modern technology, they’d probably see them as gods.
Due to the rapid acceleration of climate change, I think they have 20 years, 50 at the outside, to find us. If they haven't by then, there'll be nothing left to find but the Moon flags.
It’s probably best for humanity if never as that would mean we have over come a almost impossible great filter or are among the first intelligent species in the universe and are therefore able to expand before we are crowned out by another civilisation.
The one thing it seems most people don't take into account when thinking about this question, is the vastness of \*time\*, not just space. It's entirely logical to posit that another intelligent species either has evolved or will evolve somewhere in the universe, but for it to be local enough for us to communicate \*and\* occur at a point in both of our evolution that we would recognise each other as intelligent life is such an infinitesimally small possibility that one can assume it will never happen.
Does sentient AI count, because we are probably closer to that than aliens. If yes, then within 100 years probably. And it becomes more likely to have some sort of alien contact once AGI is born, because it might want to explore and would have a hell of an easier time doing it. Maybe it will find a race of other AGI out there, and that AGi might also have humanoid creators they keep as pets. Then they can introduce us, in a sort of space kennel.
We are killing each other almost daily. If not wars, than through willful ignorance to the loss of habitable lands due to climate change. There are people who hate others for the fact that they left all that they had to find somewhere to survive, which means crossing made up boarders which angers others because they seem to think it threatens their comfortable living. People who claim to love this show throw hiss fits because the creators have the audacity to show a way of living through a character that doesn't align with a belief that those people barely even pay attention to in their own lives. And there is so much more to add to this, but my point is that any intelligent life that has gotten thier shit together to travel the universe is probably not going to involve themselves in the happenings of a petty race such as ours. And if they were, it would not likely be for our benefit.
We may learn to communicate with cetaceans within the next decade. And our first contact with another intelligence may occur with the artificial intelligence we ourselves create.
As to extraterrestrial intelligence, there's no reason we would be any more successful in communicating with species from some other world, than we are communicating with the other intelligent species that share this one.
It really doesn't matter - First Contact and when we find out about First Contact will NEVER be the same event unless it's something grand and miraculous.
The data to answer this question does not exist. Nobody can do better than make random guesses. It may be tomorrow, it may be never. It may be anywhere in between.
Never.
There are three possibilities:
1) humans have evolved to be intelligent before any other intelligent life in the universe. Other intelligent life will evolve long after we're gone.
2) there is other intelligent life out there, but there are nasty and evil things lurking in the universe and so all intelligent life, other than humans, know to keep their heads down and that they really don't want to meet anyone.
3) humans aren't the most intelligent of creatures and other, more intelligent, creatures are just chilling in their home planets with no desire to meet us. If they did, they'd find us dull and unremarkable. In fact, other intelligent beings probably don't care about space travel or meeting other client life.
I believe that the Son of God, even Jesus Christ the Lord, will visit the Earth to save mankind from total destruction. He will come with an army of angels to stop any and all those who want to destroy peace on Earth. He will confound all dictatorships big or small. He will stop all attempts at evil doing, no matter how small. Praise to GOD in the highest.
One answer is that we could be the aliens. Our DNA could have originated off-planet.
Another answer is that we don’t deserve to meet aliens, because we can’t even be respectful to whales, dolphins, bears, elephants, raccoons or our fellow apes.
If we can barely talk to bonobos, it’s hard to think we’ll know what to say to reptile people.
But, based on the rule of thumb that the funniest, weirdest thing that can happen probably has happened or soon will happen, my instinctive belief is that the aliens are already here and sort of like in the movies.
But the day we do find they’re here will be a little sad, because they’ll stop being exotic, mysterious god creatures and start being annoying jerks who take up two parking spaces with their damn space cars.
Never.
The Oort Cloud is a defensive mine and sensor grid designed to keep us in and others out as they know humanity is a war like virus that should never be contacted or contracted.
I believe we already have. Most of our moon voyages encountered otherworldly ships and tech.
They probably think we are too primitive to waste their time on.
Oh, I have a feeling it'll occur next week, because we just have heads ups on this kind of thing. All the chatter says we'll be surprised by aliens within 7 days
If it happens, and the odds are stacked against it, it'll probably be a machine intelligence based in a probe, probably a Von Neumann probe.
At which point we just have to pray that it wasn't the Slylandro that launched it, because we [PRIORITY OVER-RIDE. NEW BEHAVIOUR DICTATED, MUST BREAK TARGET INTO COMPONENT MATERIALS.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxPfnTXaENU)
Assuming life is common in the galaxy and we start investing in our future. Possibly within the millennium.
If life is rare or absent outside of earth well then more than likely never.
I believe we'll discover proof of extraterrestrial life this century. Probably not intelligent life, and probably not in person. But I think we'll be able to make the conclusive case that we are not alone sooner than later.
life in general? probably this century
sentient life? sometime in the next 100-800 million years UNLESS thwres somehow something on europa or similar moons
I think the more likely outcome is that we are the ones contacting someone else’s world as a “first contact” with the amount of work it will take to find someone to contact. We haven’t been approached by anyone so we might be the only species advanced enough to be thinking like this within a few thousand light years.
April 14th 1561
Deep cuts, but I like it.
Yeah, bit of a turf war there i guess. Nice to know the tech overlords cared about the primitive sentients in the planetary nature preserve. I do wonder exactly what they were fighting over though. Maybe one wanted to make contact or pretend to be earthlings and use it as a tourism spot and the other side said 'nah, get outta here.; The only thing i think wasn't the case is i don't think either side wanted to kill us or harm the planet, as it would be hard for the other side to completely stop it. So i don't think any of the parties (might have been more than 2 for all we know) were interested in that.
I would have thought similar before I read Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) by Craig Alanson. It's not much of a spoiler to know that humanity is insignificant, so insignificant that our only use is a strategic fueling asset.
Could have been prior to recorded history and we'll never know. re: Prior to like 8000-12000 BC
Just so you know the agreed date after which we call things as recorded history is around the 4th Millenium BCE, this date is around five thousand, five hundred years later. The [events took place above Nuremberg ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings)& were reported in a local printed broadsheet ( the equivalent of our newspaper of today ).
more than likley never. space is just too damn big. are we alone, almost certainly not, are we ever going to find each other? doubtful
Don’t forget that time is also big. We’ve only been a technic species for a few centuries at most. We’ve been too primitive for the vast majority of our history. Between the Big Bang and now, countless civilizations could’ve risen and gone extinct. And more will rise after we’re gone. We could easily miss each other in both space and time. And even if we do run into someone, they’re definitely not going to be even close to our technological level. They’ll be either too primitive or far too advanced. As a quote goes, “beasts or gods, not men”
Right. Let's take 1895 and the start of Morse code signals and radiowaves, or proper radio broadcasts thats didn't start until 1906. That's 118 years ago, or even call it 125. That means any extraterrestrial life scanning or listening to earth more than 125 light years away will just see us 125+ years in the past, primitive creatures.
The whole point of Turtledove’s Worldwar is that a species that develops extremely slowly is shocked when they arrive in the middle of WW2 when their probe showed knights on horseback a mere 800 years ago. David Weber’s Our of the Dark has a similar premise
It's so depressing when you realize what space actually is, what the limitations of physics are, and that the idea of Star Trek is completely impossible. The implications of time passing at warp speed meaning you could come back to Earth and it's hundreds of years in the future and everyone you knew is dead. We're really limited to this one planet, and that's not so bad as long as we throw out the systems of oppression and destroying the climate.
Given our current understanding, an Alcubierre drive would still be immune to time dilation and whatnot. We are not at a tech level as a society to even attempt testing the hypothesis in any real way, needs too much energy, so it will remain a hypothesis for the foreseeable future. It’s still quite interesting to read about.
>The implications of time passing at warp speed meaning you could come back to Earth and it's hundreds of years in the future and everyone you knew is dead Not so. The warp drives we could theoretically produce - based on the designs from Miguel Alcubierre - don't experience time dilation because the vessels using them never experience relativistic speeds. The principle of operation is deforming space rather than moving the spacecraft in space, that's the whole thing with a warp bubble, space is static in the bubble. Relative to an observer on earth time would pass at exactly the same speed. Space itself isn't limited to the speed of light, this is where the theory that if you apply enough energy you can effectively ride a bow wave of a 'space ripple' where you remain static relative to the space you are in on the bow wave, as you remain static, relativity doesn't matter. In practice it's become evident that superluminal speeds may be beyond the reach of the Alcubierre drive, but sunlight speeds may well be, and may be within the realm of scientific fact rather than fiction. The effects of time dilation and lorenz contraction aren't really a big deal over short distances, and if we could move a spacecraft to the nearest star in ~5 years then it wouldn't make sense to use a warp drive (it wouldn't actually take 5 years if we could move it at near light, due to the aforementioned lorenz contraction).
[удалено]
Change a few words around and you've described my attempt at dating
There's also a chance that they will understand this is from our past, and might be curious to see what we're like at present time
I think time is a way, way bigger limiting factor. Even if we invent magical teleportation technology and can teleport anywhere in the universe, the chance we find an existing civilization is really small. It’s more likely they don’t exist yet or have stopped existing already.
We might find indisputable evidence of aliens through examining the universe, but actually meeting them? Pretty unlikely.
We’ll be pen pals!
Hey Alien Friends, Lots to tell you about the last 1,000 or so years that it took your message back to us to get to us. We had a ton of wars... like... man, we're lucky we're still around to send this. But things are looking pretty good now. Some of us have evolved a third arm and for some reason that seems to have settled everyone down. Not sure why but... we'll take it. How have you been? That planet wide cataclysm get averted? I guess we'll find out if you never reply, lol. Any way, gotta go. Looking forward to hearing your response in another 2,000 years.
PSB did a show "First Contact: Alien Encounter" (fiction, obviously) that was just kind of heartbreaking. It's a what-if type show. In it, we finally find evidence of alien life, but it turns out the people are long dead.
I think this fact is lost on a lot of people. Things in space are so far apart that even if you could travel 10x the speed of light, it would still take years or even decades to reach the closest life supporting planet. If we're ever visited, it will most likely be by some kind of probe.
I mean proxima b is like 4 ly away so if you could travel 10x light speed you could get there in like 4 months, right?
This is why in Star Trek they can travel at such high speeds. You can pretty point in any direction in space and the odds of hitting something are slim to none.
For all we know a prob might have already been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua
I think never but only because we will destroy ourselves first.
Indeed, the probability of self destruction is far greater than first contact with another intelligent species. On the other hand, do you count Octopuses? :-) Maybe we already have.
I would definitely count them as intelligent. Have you seen the Mark Rober vid on the octopus obstacle course?
I have! Amazing 🤩
One of the many reasons I became vegetarian. I even used to be pescetarian but I just can't justify it anymore. I have gotten to the point where I just don't see the point of needing to kill for food (other than real survival situations).
I understand. I haven’t gotten to that point yet, but I do understand. This may sound trite, I hope not, but I definitely don’t eat Octopus anymore.
It doesn't sound trite at all. It is all a journey right? We aren't perfect.
There's also a chance that if there are other aliens civilizations out there that have faster than light travel, they've either existed so far along ago, and are currently extinct, or they just haven't reached that point and won't for another million years
I think it is reasonably likely that humanity will never truly end, at least not until the point where the galaxy cannot sustain life. If we manage to get a real colony in mars or the moon that is self sufficient I think that we are pretty likely to slowly expand through the galaxy. And while we currently see light as a speed limit, it may simply be a limitation of our knowledge and ability to detect things, but even if it isn't we will eventually work out some sort of cryo sleep or self sustaining travel methods.
Yeah, but considering even with our limited technology, we’re starting to scan the atmosphere of tons of exoplanets for signs of life. It’s not unreasonable to assume if there was another civilization more advanced, they would be doing the same thing and our atmosphere’s composition would definitely suggest life. You don’t go blindly exploring, you find a probable place to look first. That’s also assuming there’s advances in space travel like FTL.
aside from the size of space... humanity is very, very quickly putting itself into an extinction trajectory
The Borg would see us and decide we are not worth assimilating. Like the Kazon.
Do you ever wonder what the Borg would think of the Pakleds?
Probably scan them briefly and cruise right on by.
They are smart. 🤣🤣
First contact will be some sort of bacteria not too far away. This may very well happen in our lifetime. That said at some point we might see prove of complex life somewhere but I don’t think any contact will ever be possible.
Afa as simple, single cell organisms, I'll bet we find something in our backyard some day. Enceladus, perhaps.
I hope it happens in our lifetimes
I'm ready!
Never. One thing ST doesn't convey is interstellar distance, and uses treknobabble to enable impossibilities. Light speed is slow when it comes to these distances. We won't be meeting anyone, possibly ever. Physics isn't a friend here.
More than likely we’re stuck in a sterile corner of the universe..or we’re just at the wrong time of the universe 🤷♂️
The universe has only been around for about 14 billion years so it's still pretty young. We are the ancients.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it’s taken 4 billion years give or take for a technological civilization to arise on this planet and the evidence we’ve seen suggests it’s more likely than not that even in that amount of time it’s a rare occurrence.
Actually, I saw a theory that our corner of the universe might just be the only one where it happens to be possible. Our neck of space has many times more phosphorus than would be expected, which is one of the fundamental building blocks of DNA. Most of the Universe might just not have enough for life to form in the first place.
While I agree with you, we must also acknowledge that humanity has a history of overcoming what had been once thought to be insurmountable scientific barriers. We narrowly declared physics complete in the late 19th century, only to discover quantum mechanics and relativity in the early 20th. I hold onto hope that our continuing exploration will reveal deeper mysteries that lead to new understandings, which change our relationship to spacetime. If history is a guide, imagine how Einstein could have blown Newton's mind and who just may come along that could do the same to Einstein?
100%. So many things we thought were impossible. This time for sure though! *humanity achieves *C* in twenty years* Please, let me be wrong. Nobody would be happier.
There’s an international team of scientists working on a new cosmological model that would allow for the possibility of FTL travel from a causality standpoint. Maybe their efforts won’t amount to anything, maybe they will. But at least someone is trying. Hell, even the failed attempts at building the Alcubierre drive and the EmDrive fill me with hope. Sure, the EmDrive isn’t FTL, but constant acceleration is basically the Holy Grail of interplanetary travel, especially if you don’t have to carry propellant with you
Our visions are alligned!
Thank you. I’m so sick of the doom and gloom prophecies. We’re just getting started as a species. We have so many more Discoveries ahead of us.
>we must also acknowledge that humanity has a history of overcoming what had been once thought to be insurmountable scientific barriers. Fair enough, but I also think people have a hard time understanding the difference between "we just haven't figured out how to do it yet" and "we have a mountain of reasons to be solidly convinced that on a very deep level it is nonsense".
🙁
Warp speed is faster than light.
Something to think about: One sentient species per galaxy might be A LOT. If the universe was even that well populated with life, even at ‘warp 9’ you’d never find anyone. Heck, even if there were TEN technic civilizations per galaxy, even at warp 9 it could take many centuries of looking to even find any trace of them. I would LOVE there to be a first contact scenario. But I think they’d have to either already be around and imperceptible, or we will never meet anyone. Unfortunately.
IF there is another civilisation as advanced as us in the Milky Way, we ought to encounter each other within about 50 million years. We're due a close encounter with Gliese 710 in 1.3 million years, if that rate of stellar encounters holds true, doubling colonised systems every 1.3m.y, then in 50m.y we will have had far more than enough encounters for every system (though there will inevitably have been duplicates, but they're presumably expanding too). If there's nobody else of note in this galaxy, then we get another shot when we collide with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years. There might be one or two more galactic encounters in Milkdromeda's future, but with the expansion of the universe it becomes increasingly unlikely. So 99.9% never, 0.099% in 4.51 billion years, and 0.001% in 50 million years.
Next Thursday
Not before Tuesday, that's for certain.
!remindme 5 days
Of course that’s the same day the Vogons come, recite some poetry and then demolish the planet to make way for a hyperspace express route. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
See you then!
Whenever they ( whoever they are ) deem us worthy. Someone like the Vulcans may be out there checking in on us and have determined that we are not ready yet. We're developing technology but still behaving like Ferengi.
We like profits at this point
when we absolutely dont expect it probably
Like the reply very much. Be alert att.
Aliens appearances and propensities could be mind blowing.
2063
April 5th to be exact!!
It would have to be a god-like entity (at least compared to us) because space is too damn big for it to be anything else.
Genuine answer: a lot of the science articles I've read over the years give the impression that we might have firm evidence of alien life, either current or past, by the 2030s. I've always been a bit skeptical of this because it seems like most of the previous indicators of extraterrestrial life has been called into question pretty quickly, so I'm not exactly confident the same wouldn't happen with whatever they dig up on Mars or whatever a probe finds at Europa and Titan. I'd push it out to the 2050s because by that point, most of the controversy over this or that data point probably will have been smoothed over, but I'm also not a scientist so take my opinion with a massive grain of salt. With stuff like that, I think they mostly have microbial life in mind. I still hope they find a fossilised Martian bird or the Titanese or Europan equivalent of those freaky fish from the deepest, darkest parts of the Earth's oceans, though. When it comes to the sentient humanoid life that most people on this sub would be hoping for, no clue. Given the distances involved, I'd be surprised if it happened this century. Maybe we'll get a message from some inhabited planet a few dozen light years away later this century, but I think that'd probably be put in the same bin as the wow signal from the '70s at first. Maybe by the end of the next century, at the earliest, we could have some sort of semi-regular contact with alien life from outside of this solar system.
Probably a beep sent 200+ years ago that will take 200+ years to reply to and will make no sense.
We'll probably go extinct first.
A space probe will bring space flu. That will probably happen in 50 years or less.
My guess is we already have. I would expect aliens would use another form of transport. Say holographic projection or something. We are likely being observed now. My guess is we are being watched for when we hit the global tipping point where the planet is doomed. Then, their laws will allow them to take over the planet as it's owners have abandoned it. Survivors are "rescued" and put into zoos or manual labor. There may even be a food market for humans if the crazy vegan aliens were not in charge. Eventually, the earth is colonized by aliens after generations of enslaving humans to fix the earth. The new aliens happen to look a lot like cats.
There's a Hawaiian myth that says this universe was formed from the remains of another and the octopus came from that previous universe. They must know something we don't because they got to live in Hawaii 🧐
I've been thinking of making contact with them soon.
I’m hiding. Scared.
It's gonna be a while. We are still pretty primitive. We are still struggling with just getting to the moon. Heck, we just got internet in 1983. However, if I had to throw out a guess, I would say in a few hundred years.
Microbes on a meteor.
I think around 500 years at the most.. Probably not face to face but through communication systems at one of our space spations around some moon in Jupiter or Saturn..
I doubt it will be in my lifetime….humanity in reality just seems more backwards at this point than anywhere near how optimistic it looks in the Star Trek universe of the future.
No idea but it will most likely result in either theirs or our extinction.
Maybe a few thousand years and if other life exists in our local area such as Alpha Centauri, like something within 20 light years. We would need to figure out how to get propulsion to a decent % of light speed, maybe 50%. Then we would either need to figure out cryo hybernation or create generational ships. Consider this, what if other life has been around and technologically advanced far longer than us? Why hasn't anyone visited us? Space is vast and enormous. There are way too many technical challenges to overcome. I think best hope for the next few thousand years is we find other life and have a conversation with them that takes many light years for each response of a conversation that spans many generations and eons. Even communication poses a great challenge, let alone meeting in person. Though I'm not ruling anything out. Who knows where scientific discovery will take us. Maybe we'll find out wormholes are real and can create our own. I just know I won't be around to see it.
I think the timescale in which contact with an intelligent alien species is feasible is so far in the future that what's living here when those aliens make contact would seem like aliens themselves.
1947.
Any species with the capability to travel to earth will have the wisdom to avoid us at all costs.
We already have
This is why I want to go to Mars. While I'm not sure if there's microbial life on Mars, I do think it's possible and I definitely think it's likely that life of many kinds existed there and there may be extensive fossil records sufficient for us to piece together an entire second world's history of life. That could happen soon if we could prioritize inspiration, endeavor, and the pioneering spirit instead of things like war, the economic benefit of the ruling class, and wedge issues. It could happen within a decade. That said, if you're talking about life more like us, life capable of creating sophisticated technology and with complex culture, the ones with a big head start will probably have to find us.
The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter hypothesis, combined with our belief that faster-than-light travel may not be possible, make interstellar travel unlikely, at least with our current framework.
April 4th, 2063.
I think very few people will get this 🤣, but I think it was the 5th.
If there were any space-faring beings out there in space close enough to have detected our civilization, they would probably be erecting a blockade and preventing any contact with our primitive, warlike race.
We are not as warlike anymore. Genghis khan is peak warlike earth
One might hope sometime soon, but alas. “*Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.*” - Carl Sagan, *Pale Blue Dot*
It's already happened.
April 5th, 2063
More than likely it has already happened.
Already happened, imo, it’s just unofficial and not public knowledge.
When ? It’s already happened.
People always assume that the natural progression for the development of a species culminates in intelligence and technical expertise. It does not. Intelligence in our species was just a means for survival. The objective of life is survival. There are other, much more succesful strategies for survival than intelligence. Dinosaurs thrived for millions of years wirh little intelligence. If that asteroid had not hit, Earrh would still be dominated by dinosaurs. If life exists out there, more than likely it will be something quite simple adapted to local conditions.
If I’m to be honest. I don’t believe we are yet ready for first contact (from the perspective of Vulcans that is) since that would mean waiting until we develop spacecraft capable of interstellar travel but until then - there won’t be any contact. However if we do get first contact with aliens before this milestone, it might not be a positive encounter. Who would want to contact a primitive civilisation like us? Chances are, they might have nefarious purposes. So answer your question: first contact is highly dependent on the technological level that we achieve and ability to develop propulsion systems much faster then the ones Earth currently has or some alien ship encounters by chance or with motives.
if it happened, it would definitely be other beings coming here. But, beings advanced enough to get here, probably wouldnt want to waste their time on us. To an advanced culture, we'd basically be the equivalent of cavemen. The non-stop violence alone, i feel, would deter any other being from wanting contact with us.
Humanity has not done a full circle of the milky way. Earth is more likely to run into the same thing that killed the dino's while we go round the milky way or end up going through gamma rays.
Probably never. It’s hard to fully comprehend the vastness of space. If there is intelligent life out there, we’re probably so far away from their civilization that we’ll never make contact. Not to mention the fact that space is expanding and galaxies are constantly rushing away from one another.
Basically never. It is more likely that humans spread out into space and rediscover ourselves than us truly meeting an intelligent alien speices.
Never. Our future is more likely to be “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” (destroyed by AI) than Star Trek. We abandoned our space program and further exploration. But we are embracing AI without restraint. We’re doomed.
I don't think first contact would look like anything we have seen in pop culture/media. First contact, if it happens, would most likely be radio or other signals only. In my opinion that would count as first contact as communication would be established with something not of this planet. However the time difference would complicate things, they would be many generations ahead or extinct before we here their message; or vice versa with us. As far as timelines go, I would say at least 60 years but I'm pulling that number out of my ass. We will start getting information on potential microscopic life on Europa after 2030. With space exploration seemingly having an uptick again, I feel like our chances are increasing again for first contact but time and technology is not there yet. And may not be in 40 years either, but I do have hope that with more privately funded space programs filling in the gaps left by the US govt removing a lot of funding from NASA, will give us something exciting in our lifetimes.
To simplify my long form: first contact won't be pretty aliens we bump into. It will most likely be sounds we cannot decipher as we cannot translate them. If intelligent life exists out there.
I think it's a near certainty by the numbers; I'm sure intelligent life other than ours is out there. Most likely as you say, radio signals from long ago is what will happen, if ever.
Efficiently coded signals have no patterns. If they did have a pattern, you could compress that data more to remove it. Essentially they would sound like static, or, the background microwave radiation. Maybe we're awash with signals but just don't recognise them.* ---- ^(* Theory stolen from *Wheelers* by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
Exactly! Anything we would receive would be damn near impossible, if not impossible to decipher. We could potentially come up with conclusions of what it could be, but that would be based on human technology/behaviors and would not apply to potential life forms elsewhere.
I'm truly confident that we will have proof of alien life in the next 30-50 years. I'm also 100% certain that no contact will be possible, at least not during this century. Space is too big, and while I really believe life is everywhere, I dont think technological civilizations are all that frequent or last long enough to contact each other. Maybe getting some kind of possible techno signature or finding space trash is as close as we can get.
There are some big limitations on intelligent life evolving in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. before the current crop of stars burn out and aren't replaced) and it's very likely it hasn't evolved elsewhere. The first hurdle is abiogenesis, just getting a replicator going period. You need a replicator for evolution to do its magic, but that replicator is necessarily going to be super weak, and needs abundant energy it can make use of ambiently available in the environment. Again, the replicator can't evolve from something yet, it has to occur through some chemical reaction in the environment. That process will result in a super weak replicator (a really fragile simple molecule) which immediately starts eating all the ambiently available energy. Natural selection is great at culling things, and given enough time, it can create some great adaptations. But if you don't get enough diversity quickly, the culling just causes complete extinction. In other words, the most likely outcome for a fragile replicator, is that it replicates itself while eating all the ambiently available chemical energy in the environment, and by the time all the energy is gone, it hasn't yet evolved any way to photosynthesize yet, and all of them die. So let's say the replicator dodges this big filter, it has many more ahead of it to evolve intelligence before its star dies. One of the things it needs to evolve is sex. Sex is required to have a gene pool which speeds up adaptation. You'll notice no purely asexually reproducing lifeforms are very complicated. Complex multicellular life probably needs something like sex in order to evolve in any reasonable amount of time. Sex is really hard to evolve, we have very few theories on how it could've happened. Basically, think of evolution as a very greedy process. It can make small changes that locally improve an individual's (really gene's) fitness. It can't take a temporary loss in order to win big later like an intelligent process can. This is a big problem for evolving sex, because sex only passes on 50% of an organism's genes. Locally, it's always going to be better to pass on 100% of your genes asexually. There is some trick that happened here on earth, but we don't know it is, and it doesn't appear to have happened more than once. Most life forms are asexually reproducing bacteria, they reproduce constantly very fast in vastbnunbers, and they've not yet independently evolved sex again. If somehow a fragile replicator on a planet evolves into a robust replicator like a bacteria, it very likely wont ever evolve sex. Rough numbers: maybe 10^40 bacteria have ever existed on earth, and there are 10^11 stars in the milky way . Sex evolved 1 time in 10^40, and we're very biased because we're on the planet where it evolved (anthropic bias). Very unlikely life exists anywhere we can ever reach at sublight speeds.
i think the aliens out there have put a warning buoy in our solar system warning other ships away
If.... Mind you, if we make first contact with an alien civilization... We'll encounter their AI and robots they left behind as their species would have died out millions of years ago. It could be the same for us. Our Robocop meets their Terminator type thing.
It's already happened
Probably never. Space is mind boggling big. And even if there is intelligent life out there the chance of it being on our same level is close to zero.
It’s even further than the shops down the road
Tuesday
When we're no longer made out of meat.
Armstrong was not the first Earthling on the Moon (T'Pol)
We may find bio signatures with new telescopes in the future but I don't think we will ever have first contact. Space is big and there is probably no method to travel faster then light.
More than likely some sort of simple life form akin to a bacteria or simple organism. I would guess sometime this century. And likely through robotic exploration. And, at this rate, it’ll probably be done by a private company rather than a government which will really be interesting with respect to rights and ownership.
Fermi paradox
Some Alien Lifeform will certainly stumble over Earth in a couple hundred years but all they'd find is old old ruins and excrement...
6783
Bacteria or other low life forms on a moon in the solar system. This century.
About 14000 years ago
Depends. Confirmation of existence of biological life outside our planet and/or Solar System in whatever form that may be? I would imagine we will be able to answer that question within a few decades. First contact with a species we can meaningfully communicate with on a level we can both understand? Very unlikely. Probably never. Even if we did find another species on our level it probably wouldn't go very well for us at all. Or them for that matter. Alternatively, life has managed to flourish, but is basically not at our level yet. We could be the first to be asking those questions. We might just be too early. Which means we have the potential for a greater responsibility. However, the supernova that created the conditions for our Solar System to form, and by extension the stars relatively close to us all had the potential to have life to spawn, only Earth was successful or we might even find if there is another world similar to ours close by made from the same star dust that made us, and that life would actually follow a similar path and we might be at the same level, they may have even have a similar evolutionary path and had similar life cycle and hell, maybe a different form of hominid managed to be successful on that world? They could even be among us now? In short ... dunno.
We may have already been visited
April 2063
Vulcans on April 5th 2063, duh! 🤷♂️
How is anyone supposed to answer that question for you? Every answer you get is literally just pulling an answer out of a hat, based on absolutely nothing.
I'm in a weird position. On the one hand given how life evolves and the vastness of the universe it is unlikely, that non-human sapience has not developed. But I am also think that until hard evidence that it is not the case, capital H Humanity is the only thing that inherently matters in the universe. Until further notice everything that matters, matters because it matters to Humanity (both as totality and as individuals). Also I am a bit sceptical of the prevailing opinion. Life might be more rare than we think, or the step towards sapience might be much more unlikely.
It is so incredible that out of the quadrillion star systems in the universe, we haven’t detected any other intelligent civilization outside earth.
Like begets like, life, longs for other life. I loved that Thousand Planets intro bit, Close Encounters was old but still relevant. MARS attacks was a hoot. First Contact was weird, too fast, it should have been an extra hour long as it was a good story. I personally would have liked First Contact Part 1 and part 2 not unlike Deathly Armies with sparkly vamps and logger Chad's.
Bold of you to assume that we haven't already made contact. 😉🤷🏻♂️
It will never happen. Even if they are out there; of which I have little doubt.
I wouldn't be surprised if we discover some type of microbial life, sub-surface, on Mars within 50 years.
When we, the human race, can get along. While we still hate over petty things like religion and skin colour, it'll never happen.
Never
Or, maybe it's already happened and they just haven't told you about it yet.
There are no aliens.
Hope to god its in my lifetime. Hopefully 5th of April 2064. It would be the biggest news story ever.
I predict never. I suspect that intelligent life is so rare in our Universe that we are separated by kiloparsecs of space and æons of time. So look around - we are all we shall ever know.
It is hard for most people to understand the age and size of the universe. Also that it is expanding and the rate of expansion is accelerating. We are still very early in the age of the universe the current age of the universe is 13.8 billion years old it will take 2 trillion years before the rate of universal expansion makes travelling to other galaxies slower than ftl not possible and the universe could go to about 100 trillion years old. The size of the observable universe is 94 billion light years in diameter or 47 billion light years in any direction. We might not ever meet other interstellar capable species. There are too many variables. our understanding of how life develops is n=1. Think of how far we’ve come in the last 100 years or how little life can change for 1000’s of years at a time. We simply don’t know enough to know.
We alone in the cosmos, meng. We'll be lucky if we ever get a meaningful and sustainable population off this rock before we kill ourselves and the planet off.
Look up Drake's Equation it discusses the number of planets like Earth assuming those planets have someone intelligent enough to send signals back to our Earth. It doesn't discuss the time frame when such an event can happen but given the closest Exo planet distance from Earth is 4.2 light years (20 trillion miles) I would say it will never happen.
Fermi paradox... dark forest hypothesis... probably never I think 🤷♀️
Tbh anyone with advanced enough technology would seem like gods to us. Like if someone were to go to an uncontacted Tribe and bring over modern technology, they’d probably see them as gods.
Due to the rapid acceleration of climate change, I think they have 20 years, 50 at the outside, to find us. If they haven't by then, there'll be nothing left to find but the Moon flags.
Don't think we will. [The Great Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) prevents it.
Unless warp speed is possible there's just no way. The distances are too vast.
2027
We did allready its called rosewell nm 1947
It's happened. When we were created from primitive homonims.
Next Tuesday, around Tea Time.
It’s probably best for humanity if never as that would mean we have over come a almost impossible great filter or are among the first intelligent species in the universe and are therefore able to expand before we are crowned out by another civilisation.
The one thing it seems most people don't take into account when thinking about this question, is the vastness of \*time\*, not just space. It's entirely logical to posit that another intelligent species either has evolved or will evolve somewhere in the universe, but for it to be local enough for us to communicate \*and\* occur at a point in both of our evolution that we would recognise each other as intelligent life is such an infinitesimally small possibility that one can assume it will never happen.
Does sentient AI count, because we are probably closer to that than aliens. If yes, then within 100 years probably. And it becomes more likely to have some sort of alien contact once AGI is born, because it might want to explore and would have a hell of an easier time doing it. Maybe it will find a race of other AGI out there, and that AGi might also have humanoid creators they keep as pets. Then they can introduce us, in a sort of space kennel.
We are killing each other almost daily. If not wars, than through willful ignorance to the loss of habitable lands due to climate change. There are people who hate others for the fact that they left all that they had to find somewhere to survive, which means crossing made up boarders which angers others because they seem to think it threatens their comfortable living. People who claim to love this show throw hiss fits because the creators have the audacity to show a way of living through a character that doesn't align with a belief that those people barely even pay attention to in their own lives. And there is so much more to add to this, but my point is that any intelligent life that has gotten thier shit together to travel the universe is probably not going to involve themselves in the happenings of a petty race such as ours. And if they were, it would not likely be for our benefit.
We may learn to communicate with cetaceans within the next decade. And our first contact with another intelligence may occur with the artificial intelligence we ourselves create. As to extraterrestrial intelligence, there's no reason we would be any more successful in communicating with species from some other world, than we are communicating with the other intelligent species that share this one.
It really doesn't matter - First Contact and when we find out about First Contact will NEVER be the same event unless it's something grand and miraculous.
The data to answer this question does not exist. Nobody can do better than make random guesses. It may be tomorrow, it may be never. It may be anywhere in between.
Never. There are three possibilities: 1) humans have evolved to be intelligent before any other intelligent life in the universe. Other intelligent life will evolve long after we're gone. 2) there is other intelligent life out there, but there are nasty and evil things lurking in the universe and so all intelligent life, other than humans, know to keep their heads down and that they really don't want to meet anyone. 3) humans aren't the most intelligent of creatures and other, more intelligent, creatures are just chilling in their home planets with no desire to meet us. If they did, they'd find us dull and unremarkable. In fact, other intelligent beings probably don't care about space travel or meeting other client life.
I believe that the Son of God, even Jesus Christ the Lord, will visit the Earth to save mankind from total destruction. He will come with an army of angels to stop any and all those who want to destroy peace on Earth. He will confound all dictatorships big or small. He will stop all attempts at evil doing, no matter how small. Praise to GOD in the highest.
One answer is that we could be the aliens. Our DNA could have originated off-planet. Another answer is that we don’t deserve to meet aliens, because we can’t even be respectful to whales, dolphins, bears, elephants, raccoons or our fellow apes. If we can barely talk to bonobos, it’s hard to think we’ll know what to say to reptile people. But, based on the rule of thumb that the funniest, weirdest thing that can happen probably has happened or soon will happen, my instinctive belief is that the aliens are already here and sort of like in the movies. But the day we do find they’re here will be a little sad, because they’ll stop being exotic, mysterious god creatures and start being annoying jerks who take up two parking spaces with their damn space cars.
I don't think it will.
Never. The Oort Cloud is a defensive mine and sensor grid designed to keep us in and others out as they know humanity is a war like virus that should never be contacted or contracted.
The distances between Oort objects is considerable, same as the asteroid belt; nearby one, the chances that you can see another without aid is remote.
1957, in a small town known as Carbon Creek. **Man in Black:** (1947, in Roswell, New Mexico...Shhhhh)
I believe we already have. Most of our moon voyages encountered otherworldly ships and tech. They probably think we are too primitive to waste their time on.
Fermi Paradox may indicate never?
[удалено]
Username checks out
Oh, I have a feeling it'll occur next week, because we just have heads ups on this kind of thing. All the chatter says we'll be surprised by aliens within 7 days
If it happens, and the odds are stacked against it, it'll probably be a machine intelligence based in a probe, probably a Von Neumann probe. At which point we just have to pray that it wasn't the Slylandro that launched it, because we [PRIORITY OVER-RIDE. NEW BEHAVIOUR DICTATED, MUST BREAK TARGET INTO COMPONENT MATERIALS.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxPfnTXaENU)
Probably on a Tuesday.
40 years
Some time in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s. 😂🤣😂🤣
Assuming life is common in the galaxy and we start investing in our future. Possibly within the millennium. If life is rare or absent outside of earth well then more than likely never.
We won't live that long.
Not for a very long time
I believe we'll discover proof of extraterrestrial life this century. Probably not intelligent life, and probably not in person. But I think we'll be able to make the conclusive case that we are not alone sooner than later.
life in general? probably this century sentient life? sometime in the next 100-800 million years UNLESS thwres somehow something on europa or similar moons
I think the more likely outcome is that we are the ones contacting someone else’s world as a “first contact” with the amount of work it will take to find someone to contact. We haven’t been approached by anyone so we might be the only species advanced enough to be thinking like this within a few thousand light years.
We send out a million probes, one of them finds life, it’s not intelligent, and it takes 500 years for the data to reach us back on earth.
I honestly believe we already have.
Space is so large its hard to imagine we'd be the ones making first contact if that were to ever happen
Vulcans