Someone said saying there is no life outside earth because we have not made contact is like saying there are no sharks in the ocean because I observed a teaspoon of ocean water.
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If you could travel at the speed of light...
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If we were but an oxygen atom in that teaspoon of ocean water, what difference would an existence of sharks make?
We have essentially the same paradox. Whether there is life in the universe somewhere or not is truly inconsequential because there is no way for us to verify it one way or another. Neither statement can be proven nor dis-proven, therefore both are equally correct or incorrect. Take your pick, but in the end it's like arguing whether a glass is half full or half empty.
They watched Ozzie and Harriet, then The Monkees and baled when Tiny Tim was on Laugh-In. They knew this thing would crash, nothing of value. Marked to be passed by.
I assume that you meant “haven’t” made contact.
That’s a great analogy though.
My wife and I will sit outside when the weather is nice and stare up at the night sky quite often. I told her the same thing one time when we were doing that. I told her that there just has to be something else out there, I can’t believe that we’re alone in this vast Universe. She didn’t think I was crazy, so that’s a good thing I guess.
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I assume that you meant “haven’t” made contact.
That’s a great analogy though.
My wife and I will sit outside when the weather is nice and stare up at the night sky quite often. I told her the same thing one time when we were doing that. I told her that there just has to be something else out there, I never will believe that we’re alone in this vast Universe. She didn’t think I was crazy, so that’s a good thing I guess.
It's not great at all IMO because it tries to negate, perhaps inadvertently or on purpose, the size of the universe. The distances we're talking about are simply unimaginable and what's even more are the timelines. We are simply observing history and any "other" civilization out there, would be doing the exact same thing.
How would traveling to a place millions of light years away even look like? You know it's not going to be the same once you get there. Heck, it may not even be there anymore by the time you arrive.
I think you’re reading too much into this. It’s just an analogy, but it makes sense in a way.
As for looking at the night sky and wondering, it’s called just kicking back and letting your mind wander. Not everything has to be turned into a right or wrong, a this or a that, or an argument just for the sake of argument. It’s just simply, kicking back and enjoying the night sky with the imagination of a child. Sometimes, we adults need to relax and enjoy simple things from time to time.
Cheers!
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Likely a reference to the block universe hypothesis. It suggests that time is an emergent property of the universe rather than an inherent property of the universe.
According to this hypothesis, time emerges as a result of quantum interactions and has a vector that emerges from increasing entropy. Or, at least that’s my understanding. I’m no astrophysicist.
In this “retrocausality” view, the light from a star 500 million light years away, when observed, would have its wave function collapse. The quantum states of those photons would be independent of time from the observer’s perspective, meaning their states in the past would “change.”
This is all still undergoing study, and could be totally incorrect, but it’s neat to think about.
If we're ever visited by aliens, they must be a lot smarter than we are.
- The distances are huge. Getting here in any practical period (even a few years) would be a fantastic feat.
- Think about how long our so-called civilization has been capable of space travel - possibly 50 years out of the few thousand years humans have been able to light a fire. We would have seemed pretty primitive to any of us let alone to any advanced viewer as late as 1850, or even 1930.
- And then think of the odds of our civilization making it as much as another century or two without reverting back to a primitive time (1) though destruction of our environment, or (2) killing most of us off through some grand military adventure.
- They would have to have managed their civilization much better than we ever have. It takes a long time to develop the capacity for space travel.
- Humans are not very good at managing our civilizations, nowhere near long enough to get to advanced space travel.
- Greenland had been settled for 400 years (about the same time as the western settlement of North America) before the Viking group all literally starved to death due to unexpected climate change, destruction of their environment and an unwillingness to adapt. The Inuit did fine, and they starved while the lakes were teeming with fish.
- The Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Aztecs, Egyptians, etc all had a pretty good thing going but they all blew it somehow.
You can make that point, but is not the purpose of the shark metaphor.
The sheer volume of the ocean is astronomically larger than the volume of a single spoon. It is an analogy used to explain probability and perspective, not a literal scenario.
I disagree "there is no way for us to verify it one way or another." Science is actively exploring this. Of course, we don't really have a universally accepted definition of life itself, so there's that.
K2-18b and more...
Food for thought. All good.
Verification means obtaining physical evidence, which we cannot do beyond our solar system. That’s why we’re sending rovers to Mars.
With observations we can only speculate.
I get the purpose of this metaphor. The difference, however is that we know 100% there are sharks in the oceans, but with the universe we can only speculate, and there is no way to change that, because the size of the universe works against us.
The probabilities tells us there must be other life forms out there, but since we cannot go and verify, that number may just as well be zero and we’re all alone. For all intents and purposes, that spoon of water will likely be all that we will be able to know as far as other life is concerned.
That seems "fishy" to me.
I almost wrote Korean J but that’s over the line
Well, it's not fight club
If we're on opposite ends of a giant elastic band that is stretching and I'm running towards you faster than that band is stretching...what is going to happen? Some objects are still moving closer to each, even as space itself expands.
MolaKule
Staff member
"So far, the only life we know of is right here on our planet Earth. But we’re looking...we don't really have a universally accepted definition of life itself."
Biologists would disagree. Life is defined as multicellular objects or organisms exchanging mass, either in the form of solids or gases—and all life has this informational program directing its functions by its genetics, its DNA.
To say we don't have a universally accepted definition of life is to say we cannot identify life as we know it. We have to have a baseline definition as to what we observe and define as, life.
So the statement that we don't have a universally accepted definition of life is totally ridiculous. This is tantamount to saying that if we observe another highly luminous object in the far reaches of the cosmos, we don't have a universal definition of a "star."
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I like the unit of measurement they cane up with. Isn't it Astronomical units or some such. I still think it's interesting when you hear that light is 8.5 minutes old when it hits earth. If you want another "we're incredibly small in the order of things." The Shoemaker Leavy comet that struck Jupiters great red spot disrupted its flow and rotation. Astronomers say that had it hit Earth we would have been wiped out and it would have continued on . To think there are rocks that size floating around is nuts.
As comedian Steven Wright said "If I travel at the speed of light in a car will my headlights work?"
MolaKule
Staff member
I don't think it is a matter of making contact.
As of right now, and of all the supposed exoplanets identified, there are no other worlds in the right distance from their suns, with the correct masses, with the correct geological or atmospheric chemistry to support any form of life.
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This is rapidly changing, and it’s super interesting to watch.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/science/k218b-potential-biosignature-webb
Single-cellular organisms are considered life, FWIW. I would go so far as to say that we might even consider self-replicating, energy-consuming pre-cellular molecules “life.”
It’s just that what we now know of as life on Earth outcompeted anything less sophisticated than a prokaryote.
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