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What do we do if SETI is successful?

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174 points leephillips | 2 comments | 20 Oct 25 17:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.642s | source
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kulahan ◴[21 Oct 25 20:23 UTC] No.45661201[source]▶
In the end, I kinda... don't care. Look up - there's nothing. There should be at least some alien civilizations trying to make their presence known. There should be some signs somewhere that could be recognized universally as either "stay away" or "come here". It really should be trivial to locate technological civilizations unless you've got some incredibly solid reason as to why EVERY SINGLE ALIEN CIVILIZATION IN THE UNIVERSE acts a certain way. Color me doubtful.

We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty. We have exactly one (1) data point showing it isn't. And that's us.

Besides, just look at the timeline. The universe has only been cool enough, with enough stable stars, with enough formed planets for potential life to form for a few billion years. Between that and the Drake equation, life alone is likely to be unreasonably uncommon. Life that forms after a planet becomes stable, doesn't have any planet-altering disasters, evolves to complex multicellular forms, evolves some kind of intelligence, becomes social, forms a society, advances technology, and starts exploring the universe...? Why bother? The math doesn't work.

Note: I'm not speaking about any KIND of life existing, I'm speaking about technological civilizations. My belief is that we are essentially the forerunners.

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mousefriend ◴[21 Oct 25 23:01 UTC] No.45662840[source]▶
> We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty.

Wat?

"Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence", Carl Sagan

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kulahan ◴[21 Oct 25 23:05 UTC] No.45662882[source]▶
You're right, but it doesn't matter - we're finding evidence of absence everywhere we look.

(Again, please note that I'm only speaking to technological civilizations; I fully believe the universe is teeming with microbial life.)

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mousefriend ◴[21 Oct 25 23:13 UTC] No.45662977[source]▶
This is just an absurd assertion.

> we're finding evidence of absence everywhere we look.

Show your work. Show me any such "evidence".

You seem to be unfamiliar even with what kind of data cosmologists and astronomers process.

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1. kulahan ◴[22 Oct 25 00:40 UTC] No.45663642[source]▶
Sure thing.

We've been to the moon. There are no machines. We've been to Mars (via machines). There are no civilizations. We've seen the orbits of thousands of planets which are absolutely too hot for any biological processes to synthesize. We've scanned countless stars and determined them to be too unstable for anything to survive in their orbit. We've looked into every single confusing thing in the universe we could find and have seen natural explanations for nearly every single phenomenon.

Do you think we just don't know anything about the universe? There is tons of evidence of absence. It might not be complete enough to make a guess yet, and that's a fine argument to make, but it's weird to pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.

edit: And again, while it's not evidence of absence, I'm still waiting for a galactic signpost to pop up somewhere. Unless you've got some explanation for why not one single civilization anywhere, even ones which have left their home planet and have nothing too serious to worry about with respect to retaliation?

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2. kulahan ◴[22 Oct 25 17:51 UTC] No.45672704[source]▶
Your infantile reading comprehension is a terrible counter to my comment.

>"I looked in every volcano on Earth, and was unable to find life. This is evidence that Earth is a lifeless husk."

How did you pull that out? This is a terrible analogy.

>"We've looked at handful of... planetary orbits(?!)... and have yet to find a single 'signpost' of civilization. This is evidence of absence."

Also not remotely what I said. I'll assume this is just a troll account and move on.