Comment by Oso_Rojo [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net on Whoever picked "aliens" on the 2020 bingo card, please collect your reward from the table up front

If it is real, finding even unicellular life on another planet would be the most incredible discovery in the history of mankind. Our little geocentric mindset would be blown completely apart.

Finding life on another planet in our solar system essentialy means the universe must be teeming with life.

Certainly, and it also means that our failure to find communications from intelligent life is that much more disturbing.

Have we existed intelligently for too short a time to find others like us? Is the great filter still ahead of us? Will we ever fuck aliens?

Could be! But at the galactic scale you’d think there’d be others out there already, expanding and broadcasting. The Fermi paradox is really a head scratcher.

or maybe that intelligent life just has other priorities than developing radio communications. like why would a pheromone based species care about radio? how would an underwater intelligent species develop technology when so much of our tech is easily corroded?

We’ve had like 10 years of actual ability to receive any sort of transmissions and we aren’t even looking that hard. We’ve been transmitting for about 100, but those signals are weak and probably wouldn’t even make it to the nearest star.

We’ve been transmitting for about 100, but those signals are weak and probably wouldn’t even make it to the nearest star.

alpha centauri is only 4.3 light years away mate, our first radio waves blew past them decades ago

Yeah, and unless they’ve been transmitting for like a century straight, we’ve had no way to listen. Also there’s always the possibility that industrialized society is doomed to fail and you end up with a bunch of tribal at best life and a huge amount of non-complex life.

Yeah, and unless they’ve been transmitting for like a century straight, we’ve had no way to listen

good point

Also there’s always the possibility that industrialized society is doomed to fail and you end up with a bunch of tribal at best life and a huge amount of non-complex life.

the Great Filter hypothesis is both depressing and horrifying

Return to monke on a galactic scale.

It’s theoretically possible for bacteria to be ejected into space by major impacts, and end up on “nearby” planets like Mars and Venus, so it wouldn’t necessarily mean multiple independent origins, but having at least two planets naturally capable of supporting life would be very significant.

we would be able to figure out if that were the case by looking at the organisms directly and seeing if they share any biological similarities

Idk, people deny the fucking pandemic, I don’t think many would care about alien microorganisms…

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