Even if they could reach us from some far-flung star system. There’s no guarantee that we would be able to even communicate with them. For instance ants use pheromones to communicate. There’s no way we could understand pheromones. We still can’t talk to dolphins. The other problem, generally when a civilization comes in contact with a less evolved civilization they tend to wipe them all out.
Comment on First contact when?
Asafum@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Unfortunately I’m on the side of: space is so unimaginably, incredibly, excessively, large that no other intelligent species is even remotely close enough to us to ever have the hopes of interacting with us. The best hope we have is finding “bacterial” life on another planet/moon here in the solar system.
Stupid physics… :(
Kintarian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Okay, but dolphins don’t have writing or any other means of storing arbitrary information. If an alien had that capability, which they will if they are a civilization, things might be very different
Because we would live in a shared reality, if both species were to try to achieve communication, we would start out with something as simple as the basic building blocks of reality, like, say, the elements of the periodic table, to build out the foundation of communication. Then you would incorporate stuff like math and logic, and then it’s downhill from there
There are ways to build up a system of communication even though the two sides are as different from each other as they can be, because ultimately, as we share the same reality, we have an objective basis to base our method of communication on. And that’s all you need. It doesn’t matter if we speak and they use odors, if we can both agree that hydrogen is hydrogen, and we can both perceive that we are in presence of hydrogen
Kintarian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Maybe we’ll get the chance someday.
31337@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I think I’ve seen calculations that we could explore every star in the galaxy with self-replicating probes in something like a million years; and other civilizations could do the same.
Deme@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
That distance exists not only in space, but most likely time as well. Extrapolating from our singular data point, it would seem that the lifespan of a technological civilization is quite short. The odds of two of those being around at the right times for even one of them to detect the passing emission shell of the other is diminishingly small.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That and OUR ability to detect things is very, very limited. We’re just barely getting to thepoint of using tricks to o serve other planets’ wntire existence, let alone any animal on those planets.
Our perspective is certainly still too small to make any true determinations on the Fermi Paradox outside of ruling out some basic extremes.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I can see intelligence arising from either competition with other species (like us) or a hostile environment (maybe like octopuses or birds, but competition is also very much at play there). The latter would obviously be a less likely place for life to exist long enough to become sufficiently complex to develop intelligence, but a culture which developed there might be much more communally minded than we are.