And by aliens I mean, outer space creatures and UFO. For whatever reason all UFO sighting footage looks either fake or like recorded with a Casio keyboard. And I find hard to believe we don’t have any decent footage of them with all the surveillance and technology we have now.
Edit: 🍿
I think it’s the other way around - people who claim it’s impossible because of “long distances” have problems imagining someone traveling using wormholes or other technologies humans have no clue about.
Usually the response to this is “yeah but why would they visit us, we don’t matter”.
Ever looked at an animal because it’s beautiful or fascinating? Why do you go to the zoo or the park? Why do anything except stay at home since you know what it’s like already?
Humans would absolutely travel to other star systems if we had the technology. Why wouldn’t they?
Our current physical theories suggest that there is no “shortcut” to travelling between the stars and it will likely not become any easier with future technology. There is no way around light speed and conservation of momentum.
I don’t doubt that alien civilizations would want to visit if they knew we existed - we certainly would want to visit another civilization if we knew it existed. But the problem is that it’s just not physically feasible. The most likely scenario is that we achieve some kind of radio communication with another civilization.
That we know of, yet. We haven’t even had particle accelerators for a hundred years; let’s give it at least 500 years of scientific research and discoveries before we say definitively that we absolutely know, without any doubts, that there’s no way around conservation of momentum.
I ain’t saying there is a way; just that we are very young, and very immature.
All due respect, our current theories are probably downright primitive to any advanced life form and there’s undoubtedly blind spots in modern day science, be it in any field.
Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.
Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.
All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.
Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.
I feel like you’re completely leaving out the gap that there will between what we’ve achieved now vs 1000 years from now. If there’s advanced life out there that’s been around for long enough, I don’t think it’s biased to say that there’s a chance their tech is far more advanced than ours. I understand what you’re saying, but let’s not pretend we’re the true generation where there won’t be any major breakthroughs. There will be, but they’ll just take longer than before. To make technological leaps comparable from the 1800s to now, it may very well take from now to the year 3000, but the point is the notion that we’re past the point of major leaps is unfounded and based on the false notion that I’m saying in 300 years we can expect technological leaps as large as we’ve seen in the last 300 years.
Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.
The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.
The space for functioning systems to co-exist within a wrong underlying model is huge. A Turing machine does not care about mathematics or logic. It just matches a sequence and swaps in a value and maybe ticks in a different direction. You could argue that the patterns themselves require a minimum of math/logic, but truthfully - no, they don’t - for the same reason that you cut cheese without needing to know what the knife is doing at the molecular level: if the input gives an expected output, you can construct entire worlds on that alone.
You don’t need to understand the composition of cheese and bread to make a grilled sandwich.
That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.
In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!
“All due respect”, this is pure speculation. We may very well be at a close approximation of physics and have a reasonably accurate understanding of the limitations. Or we may not be. But there is not really much of a reason to think that what we know now about the limitations of the universe (like the speed of light) should somehow be upended by new discoveries or theories.
This entire discussion is pure speculation-- are you really going to be that guy who says "but not my comment!"?
Are you really saying that “aliens have not been to Earth” and “aliens have been to Earth” are equal when it comes to speculation? You would need a lot of evidence to prove the latter and there’s a lot of theory to support the former.
I’m saying both arguments are speculative.
But what you are doing is also speculation. You have a firm belief that aliens don’t visit because it’s too far to travel. Because you speculate that they would use combustion engines and run out of gas, or it would take too long because they have to travel in a line (not using wormholes and whatnot).
I think some people are just more open to looking past those limitations that we have. Just because humans have those limitations does not mean others do.
Our civilization don’t have space exploration as a profession. You and I can’t even leave the planet. We have astronomers looking at things and we have space agencies that tell us what they see. And that’s it.
Us speaking about what other species can do is a bit silly. We really have no idea.
It’s super likely that others have found a way to extract energy from space itself. Humans are still focused on fighting eachother. It’s primitive here.