I've seen the question posed, "If there are intelligent, advanced life forms in the universe, why haven't they

Question

contacted us?"

Here's my question: What would make us that interesting to a super intelligent, super advanced being? Would YOU want to contact us?

Poseidon: Well, now I know who to thank! =0)

Answer 1

To quote the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

With somewhere on the order of a septillion stars in the universe, the number of living planets must number in the many millions, more likely in the billions. There must be a huge number of other intelligent species in the universe.

Lets be optimistic and assume there are 10 billion intelligent species in the universe, each inhabiting 1 planet. In that case, the chance of being close enough to another to be able to communicate using current technology is just about nil. In fact, only 10 billion intelligent species would mean that the likelihood of another sharing our own galaxy is very small.

Of course, it is very likely that future technologies will extend our range tremendously, but even if we eventually have methods so powerful that we can communicate across galaxies, then we would have to hope to catch transmissions broadcast millions of years ago. Dialog would be impossible.

If by amazing fortune there is another intelligent species in or galaxy, and it happened to be very close, and used the same technology, dialog might be possible with latency between query and response in as little as a few decades. The average latency between any two points in our galaxy would be about 80,000 years.

Answer 2

>I've seen the question posed, "If there are intelligent, advanced life forms in the universe, why haven't they contacted us?"

This is know as the Fermi Paradox. You can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_Paradox

>Here's my question: What would make us that interesting to a super intelligent, super advanced being? Would YOU want to contact us?

It seems likely that highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations could hardly HELP contacting us. They would be expanding through space and letting out all sorts of radiation in the process, so even if they weren't interested in us we would probably still see them (just as ants can still see a human walking by due to its sheer size, even though the human doesn't care about the ants). If they were that much more advanced than us, they would have no reason to deliberately hide themselves from us as we would be unable to harm them. No, I really don't think this is in itself a good answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Answer 3

Since we are only barely able to distinguish a few extra-solar planets, and then those are extremely large or extremely close to the sun we have no way to make any sensible guess as to how many civilizations there could be in the galaxy.

If they are out there,
And they have a faster than light travel
And they want to talk to us

They still have the problem that there are about 300,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy. How are they supposed to actually find us? We have been transmitting radio for about 100 years, so we are potentially detectable in a volume of about 4,200,000 cubic light years, however that is roughly 0.000025 % of the volume of our galaxy.

If the light speed limit on travel can not be broken there could be millions of civilizations in our galaxy, but we have no way of detecting each other or traveling to each other.


As to why would they want to visit? Curiosity. The more inteligent creatures are on Earth the more curious they seem to be, so I would suspect that any inteligent life form would be curious about our planet and us.

Answer 4

No, I wouldn't. We are ruining our planet, we kill each other, I would leave us totally alone, and contact the folks on a nicer planet.
Can't think of a thing we have that others would want, except to tap us for resources, but then again, we have Will Smith here, we are safe from aliens. Love that movie. Best scene is when he punches the alien, and drags it across the desert, griping at it the whole way.
Poseiden is wrong, you aliens didn't give us spinning toothbrushes, you gave us pet rocks and text messaging to distract us so we would not discover your real intent. . LOL, good one, Poseiden! You're sending us a message through the toothbrush, right?

Answer 5

I think the real answer is time and distance.

The Universe is EXTREMELY big, so big that the Andromeda Galaxy our closest neighbor Galaxy wise is hundreds of millions of light years away. Until some life form is capable of inventing a form of travel that is faster than the speed of light, it is unlikely we are going to meet up with any of them.

Its like two people being set down on either side of Asia. If they were the only two people on the continent, what are the chances that they are going to find one another before the end of their lives. Very Slim.

The fact that we have 1 planet and 2 moons in this solar system that are capable of housing life as we know it shows that there is a great chance that their is life in other parts of the universe. We like to think we are unique, but look at the odds.

There are somewhere around 150 BILLION stars in the Milky Way. Most of them have planets and other bits of debris floating around them. If our one solar system has thee viable bits of debrees, what makes us think it is any different that the Billions and Billions of other planets in our Galaxy alone?

When you add in the fact that there are Billions of Galaxies the chances of life not existing on other planets or moons becomes very slim.

Answer 6

Ray Kurzweil argues that the fact that we haven't heard from them means they aren't there, or that they are less advanced than us, or that they are too far away to have had time to contact us. He thinks that if there are millions of advanced civilizations, the chances that they all decided not to talk to us would be very small.

I'm not sure I buy his argument YET although it is compelling. Perhaps they communicate in ways we aren't monitoring. Perhaps we have detected them and don't realize it. Perhaps they wall themselves off from our universe. Perhaps the speed of light really is a limit. There are too many unknowns to assume he's right at this point. Perhaps life is plentiful but intelligent life is very rare and technological development even more rare.

Answer 7

Simple answer:

BECAUSE they are intelligent and advanced life forms. We have the power to kill an entire planet in the hands people who are little more than intellectual children. What in the world would an advanced civilization want to do with a people like us?

Answer 8

Do a quick search for the "Drake equation". It estimates how many intelligent civilizations might exist in this galaxy. Then try to estimate how far away these might be from us. Then compute how long it would take our radio signals to travel that far, and for them to respond. Then do some research, and make some estimates about how long it would take to travel to the nearest civilization, or even the nearest star. You'll get an answer to your question.

Answer 9

From observation of the human condition, no. These humans can't even get along and behave nicely with eachother, why would I subject myself to their madness? These people have killed eachother over such petty differences as theological ideology and skin color. They've proved that they try to kill everything that they don't understand or isn't almost identical to them. They don't believe in harmony unless it is consistent with their ideas and practices, otherwise they want to stamp it out.

They look for differences to separate themselves, instead of commonalities that could unite them. Petty creatures, those humans are. There are few that don't fall into the madness of the masses, but they are by far the minority and the masses would rather subjugate them and force them into the madness than learn from them and learn to get along.

What would be the result of contact? Irrational fear followed eventually by war. Better to observe from a distance and not let them know I even exist. That way, my kind could remain safe from their violent and greedy nature.

Answer 10

I agree with you. In a short story by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) a man arrives at the wrong gate to heaven-one which was meant for the intelligent life from other planets. He learns that the planet earth is considered the worst of all planets with regards to spiritual qualities in the inhabitants.