>life develops rarely, isn't very successful Pretty straightforward, planets with life are like a bunch of islands that never see each other.
>life develops frequently, isn't very successful Hard to find, since almost no planets have obvious signs of intelligent life. But if you go looking, you'll find it.
>life develops rarely, is often successful It's just chance, perhaps where we are, that we haven't seen anything.
>life develops frequently, is often successful There's a huge cosmic conspiracy, probably involving Jews.
Life never developed at all. We exist in a simulation.
Evan Morales
So what's the deal with liking futas? I've gotten into that stuff suddenly and I can't explain the appeal.
Anthony Johnson
This is my order of how desirable the different possibilities are: >life develops frequently, is often successful This is at the top because it turns out that life can develop endlessly without just doing little more than flooding the universe. It means that things we can't even comprehend await us.
>life develops frequently, isn't very successful It's difficult, but we can talk to aliens. There's still a pretty hard limit to how much we can do; like, interstellar travel will remain impractical, but at least there's something more to see than just ourselves.
>life develops rarely, isn't very successful Pretty much means that humanity gets stuck in an endless cycle of rising and falling, perhaps on more planets than just Earth. Nothing much can be expected, but humanity could last for billions of years, leading to a very interesting and rich history.
>life develops rarely, is often successful This is just nightmarish. It means that in a matter of centuries or even just decades, life as we know it will end as the technological singularity occurs, and life in the galaxy becomes nothing more than an explosion of robots. Quite possibly a grey goo scenario.
Cameron White
I feel like life develops fairly frequently, but is either too simple or too complex and intelligent to be seen because we just don't have the technology. All you need is a somewhat stable temperate and water, and I don't even think water is necessary. There's no telling what kind of life we'll find just within our solar system once we start taking samples. It's the advanced life that is more rare, but we can't probably can't detect them either. If they're advanced, then they're probably way more advanced than us. This planet is only about 4.6 billion years old, 1/3 of the universe, and it only took 200 million years to develop life. Only 4.4 billion years compared to 13.8 for the universe. That's a massive difference, think about how advanced some life may be. They wouldn't even be able to be detected by anything, let alone some lowly humans. They would be like gods to us. They're out there, but we can't see them.
Aiden Cox
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Kevin Turner
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Jordan Powell
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Andrew Gray
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Jack Hall
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Carson Hall
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Gavin Rodriguez
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Xavier Bennett
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Camden Parker
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Lincoln Taylor
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Isaac Rodriguez
>posting at max rate in a slow thread
Gabriel Reyes
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Luis Collins
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Hunter Morris
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Bentley Lopez
Sorry, 4.4 billion years was how long it took water to show up. 4.28 was long it took life. Really not long after water got here.
Jackson Martin
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Aaron James
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Carson Martin
They might be far enough away that we can still detect the light/radio signals they produced in their early existence. Doubt they could hide that.
Joseph Murphy
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Nicholas Murphy
How'd the water get here? Consider that most of the surface is water, it'd either be a huge asteroid of ice, or it was always here. Wouldn't that be the case?
Jace Thomas
Show me butts, and cute ones.
Levi Wilson
But life, by nature, is about being as commonplace as possible.
Wouldn't an ancient civilisation simply spread carelessly?
Clearly with what happens on Earth, even with a sapient species if the more sophisticated portion decides "okay, we have a high enough population" then they'll just be willingly exiting the gene pool while everyone else keeps making babies way above replacement rate.
Asher Taylor
If you figure it out, hit me up. I'd like the answer to this shit as well.
>but mous, you can't just drink and shitpost all night wrong
Jace Bailey
>US starts waking up >thread suddenly becomes shit
Gavin Gray
I fuck up threads at all hours possible.
Ethan Evans
Only 6:34 on the east coast. Most Americans aren't up yet.
Nathaniel Reed
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Jose Myers
Possibly. But the universe is still unfathomably huge, 46 billion light years across, and it's expanding and accelerating. It will be hard to detect signals if everything is getting further and further away.
That's where it gets kind of scary. Life here has gone through many extinctions, and I'm sure has many other places too, not unlikely to think they destroy themselves. This is known as the Great Filter. The universe is unpredictable, so it's very well possible that lesser suited life, like us, have died many times. I feel like there's probably not a whole lot of civilizations at our level. We're not even a type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale out of 3, and some scientists have considered even 4+. We simply aren't capable of understanding the technology that possible civilizations may have. I feel like they're out there, but very, very sneaky.
Jack Ross
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Ayden Clark
Personally, I believe that technology-creating intelligence may be vanishingly rare in the universe, and may even be unique to Earth.
Near-miraculous abilities like eyesight and flight evolved - independently - several times in different species in the history of the Earth. It says a lot that only one species ever invented the wheel, tamed fire, and drew an abstract representation of something on a cave wall that another individual could understand the meaning of.
We tend to think of the human ability to create technology being about our big brains. Really, it's more to do with clever hands. Being human required about four insane evolutionary coincidences to come together:
We evolved from ape-like ancestors who used basic tools to probe for food.
We started walking upright, which means our hands were free to become even more delicate and skillful.
We are aggressive, war-like beings who like to monopolise resources and females. Any individual who could craft a better weapon or think of a better hunting strategy was at an enormous advantage. (We tend to think of things like sabre-tooth tigers and bears as being the enemies of early humans. Not so. Primarily, we battled each other, and this is where the evolutionary pressure came from.)
We have long-lived, complex and stable social hierachies, mostly because human babies are born vulnerable and helpless, and need the protection of a tribe for a long time. In this extended youth and adolescence, humans can pick up a huge range of skills, observe each other, observe things other tribes have learned, and maybe bring these ideas together to invent something new.
Eli Green
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Nathan Gray
>very, very sneaky. I look at it like this. Throw a rock into the ocean. What are the chances it hits a fish? Now lets advance tech a shit ton more. Drop a nuke on japan. Now drop another. What are the chances of hitting a fish if you smash Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
We have pretty shitty telescopes for precision long distance viewing, and with no *real* place to point them with a high chance to spot something when we do eventually reach high level space flight it may be thousands of years before we meet another race. And that doesn't even start up the communications issues that would arise. And atmospheric differences. etc etc.
Connor Kelly
We don't even have a Dyson sphere yet, why do expect aliens to care about us? There are also other solutions, like technology having more limits than we thought. If ftl travel isn't possible, which seems to be the case as far as I know, aliens just didn't have the time to visit us since we became a little more interesting in the last 10k years. We also might just not be that interesting yet. We have just invented the printing press a few hundred years ago and are still struggling with even going to space. Why would a civilization that had technology for thousands, if not millions, of years even be interested in us? From their perspective we would probably be like little toddlers.
Austin Watson
Yep, exactly. We're a lot more stupid than we like to believe. Humans are naturally arrogant and think they're smarter than they really are. I bet some things out there would be like monsters to us, unlike anything we can imagine. I can thank H. P. Lovecraft for that idea.
Samuel Sanchez
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Gavin Rogers
>What are the chances of hitting a fish if you smash Hiroshima and Nagasaki Guaranteed
Isaiah Davis
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Lincoln Sanders
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Easton Williams
Yep. So think about beings so advanced they can obliterate galaxies. They sure as hell wouldn't want to be using them if there's other beings out there like them because they are guaranteed to notice.
Asher Price
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Nolan Lewis
>We don't even have a Dyson sphere yet It irks me that our imaginations push ideas out that may be INSANELY far beyond what is possible for any ayys out there. Maybe slipspace travel, hard light, gyro-gauss heavy weapons, and all that good shit are possible, but just not thought of. Let's say that a species exists that sees no need for war in how peaceful they are. Their ships are weak structures that essentially teleport where they want to arrive at, and mainly host crops.
Now imagine what would happen if a thousand similar species hit that point in the universe through peaceful means and become like that. Then we show up. We reached that level through brute fucking force. We become a horrifying thing they literally cannot understand because our ships are giant fucking weapons that can house people. That doesn't meant I don't think that all of the insane sci-fi ideas can't be real or be done by aliens. I'm just saying their super tech may be soooo much different than what we think up, and our warlike minds might make us the most horrifying night terror to ever crawl out of the black void of death that is space.
I meant in the sense of the object directly smashing into an ocean fish. Not slanty eyed fish looking bastards.
Ethan Lewis
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Gavin Nelson
I'm sure there's someone who's caught a fish and brought it back to either one of those cities. It's Japan, after all.
Why did humans experiment with nukes, even in the face of threat from other nations? By the time they go wiping out galaxies, I'm sure someone else, if they existed, noticed.
Cameron Wright
>Why did humans experiment with nukes, even in the face of threat from other nations? Because the first nation to have a nuclear arsenal would be king for a day. Beyond that, if no one had figured out how to nuke for a while after we did, that would be a massive sword over someone's neck when negotiating with hostile nations. Pretty much the case through most of the cold war. Who would have the fucking balls to invade Russia or America knowing they could fucking turbo-cook your country city by city?
Nathan Gomez
Who would have the balls to tackle a species with galaxy destroying powers?
