Well you’ve kind of answered your own question there about what the maths is based on and whether or not you believe in the drake equation doesn’t change that fact that it exists. I guess what you meant was that you’re not convinced by it and really that doesn’t matter either unless you’re an expert in advanced mathematics, astrophysics & cosmology and can debunk it.
Plus, the Drake equation is purely a way to calculate how many ET civilisations there might be out there, not whether or not they ever visited us. You could accept the equation and still think we’ve never been visited which is my position because all the evidence (or lack of it…) points to the fact that if technological civilisations have risen, they have been short lived.
Kinda scary when you think about it.
The one I linked in my first post, good to know you read it properly.
We don’t even know how to efficiently travel to the furthest parts of our own system, how does anyone know how long it could possibly take a civilization to expand?
We don’t know if it’s even possible yet, so what is “the maths” based on? We don’t know. Yet. Maybe someday we will.
So no, I don’t believe in things like the “Drake equation” and those others. I don’t care if Kaku says it. I’m quickly becoming unconvinced about String Theory too, unless they can come with experimental data to back up the math. Maybe CERN can do that for us someday, who knows. I don’t. It’s still fun to imagine though.
Hence the Fermi paradox. What are your thoughts on that?
It’s not like even the theory that we’re late comers to the galactic scene and civilisations have already risen and fallen has any credibility. The maths shows that it would only take up to 50 million years for a single civilisation to expand to completely fill our galaxy and that’s nothing in cosmological terms, it should have happened millions of times already. Whilst doing this they would hoover up available resources like asteroids, comets, H3, hydrocarbons everywhere etc etc and yet we see evidence of all those things as far out as we can see and that’s a long way, a long way back in time too…
Fact is, there is no credible evidence for ET at all, just a bunch of conspircay theories about aliens that managed to transverse galactic distances in FTL ships, overcoming vast distances, time effects and navigational challenges and then ‘crashed’ when they got here… yeah, that’s likely…
The Universe (hell… just the Galaxy!) is just too damn big for there to not be something else out there alive and intelligent.
I doubt we’d find them, let alone see them in our lifetimes. Maybe even in the whole lifespan of our species we may never meet them.
The distances are too great, I think. Sure, we could travel for lightyears (if there’s even a way to do so), but it might perhaps be too much of a needle in a haystack to locate. That might be sheer luck if it happens that way. The same of “them” finding us, or even knowing to look here. The Galaxy is HUGE!
I know there’s still a lot of interesting things out there to see anyway. And any “simple” life we may find can still be damn interesting. Wish I had a spaceship.
It’s highly unlikely that we’ve ever been ‘visited’ because too many implausible criteria would have to be met.
A huge number of criteria would have to have occured for intelligent life to form at all, a planet of the right size orbiting a stable star, in a stable orbit, as the right distance from the star, with the right chemical constituents and a long long time to evolve into intelligent life, not being hit by comets or meteors for a long long time, with liquid water blah blah blah etc etc
Then this life would have to have evolved at exactly the same time that we have in a universe 13.6 BILLION years old, we’ve only been here for a couple of million years which is absolutely nothing by cosmic standards, somthing like 0.00000001%, pretty long odds…
Even if by some unlikely coincidence they do exist AND have space faring ability, they would need to have FTL technology because the distances involved are astonishingly huge in a galaxy 100k light years across and assuming that they have that then the kind of technology we see depicted in the supposed ‘proof’ paintings much more closely resemble our own idea of what a spaceship should look like than what they would actually look like if they were built by a culture that can transcend the laws of physics as we understand them currently.
Then they’d have to know about us, the alternative is that they stumble across us in their travels… also extremely unlikely given the volumes of space we’re talking about and distances involved, and they couldn’t have known about us because we’ve only been emitting radio transmissions for a short time and they would have degraded by a few lights years out anyway so we’re not broadcasting our locaiton like people think we are.
Alsoo, and more conclusive than anything else IMO is the Fermi paradox (the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.) If intelligent life exists/has existed, why do we see no evidence of it? Where are the Dyson spheres, the engineered stars, the wash of manufactured radiations, the evidence of resource depletion etc etc. why do we see nothing when we look out there but empty space?
And on and on, you could write a book containing the evidence to show that not only have we never been visited but that intelligent life probably doesn’t exist right now anyway (and people have) and yet… 50 thousand americans think they’ve been abducted by aliens since the second world war which by my reckoning makes it about 2 abductions per night, every night, for 65 years. No comment.