Comment by echelon
16 days ago
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system.
When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside.
Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.
It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. Can't do that when you're stuck inside water. It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead. Little evolutionary pressure on reasoning over time and distance.
And it's hard to leave water. You need to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And then you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.
So many reasons.
The distances of space are certainly one holding us back now.
One thing I keep wondering, though, is whether “life” is tied more to the particular chemistry and environment it uses or to its patterns (the abstract information structure that can, in principle, be re-instantiated on different substrates).
If it’s the patterns that matter, do you think it’s actually impossible for those patterns to be transmitted across interstellar distances? Just like a cup of ocean water is packed with DNA, it’s at least conceivable that what we call “cosmic background noise” could, in principle, hide extremely compressed life-patterns that only an advanced civilization could recognize and reconstruct back into something we’d meaningfully call “alive.” And of course, the more efficiently you code that information, the more it statistically has to look like random noise.
Not saying this is likely -- just that if the essence of life is informational rather than chemical, "traveling" could look very different for any life that is suitably advanced.
>It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead.
I think it was the book Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan where he hypothesized aliens living in Venus and how they wouldn't be able to see the stars and other planets because their atmosphere is too thick to see through with visible light and also their perpetual, opaque cloud cover made of sulfuric acid.
He described how everything would change if they managed to just escape their planet for the very first time and see a new world out there that they never even imagined existed. A world more vast and complicated than their brightest minds could have ever thought of.
Damn, I might need to read some Carl Sagan again!
The resource thing always gets me. More ideas of things like dyson sphere's. Where does the material from them come from?
Probably from deconstructing the solar system's asteroids and planets. I imagine a Dyson sphere would be less structurally sound and harder to get right – due to gravitational forces on the material – than a Dyson swarm or matryoshka brain. The latter made of independent satellites orbiting the sun and collecting light from concentric orbits at various distances.
Yeah we don't even live under the sea, or populate Antarctica.
Those are thousands of times more hospitable than outside earth.