There are no aliens.

6000+ planets and every single one of them is hostile to both carbon and silicon based life forms

Possible, but in your metaphor, who's to say that the lion won't walk alway while you prepare for safe contact? What if in that time that lion dies from natural causes, or develops new weaponry that you are not prepared for? Theres always some ifs and buts, and some point you just gotta make the leap or decide it will never be worth it.

​@@Just_Dave1 so the lesson here is that it doesn't matter if you're prepared or not. Just go over to greet the lions and see what happens.

@@matteofilm If you value contact with other planets, then yes. Point is. it's impossible to know whether or not youre ever properly prepeared for first contact. And even if we get a whole arsenal of fancy weapons to annihilate the aliens ''just in case'', that could just as well be perceived by them as an existensial threat prompting them to attack first. So, either you just have to decide to make the gamble and go for first contact, or decide the risk is not worth it and stay quiet.

I have seen a UFO up close, SETI and METI are already obsolete, aliens are here and I think they have been here for thousands, if not millions of years. We think that we are responsible for how fast tech has developed in the last 200 years, when the fact is we are either back engineering or being helped along by another race(s) Sorry, but I saw what I saw and there's no mistaking it for something humans made.

I don't agree. We may be "only beginning" for a very long time. Why sit on a capability that we have now. Just living is a risk. I'm not interested in being afraid of the unknown. When there is a whole universe to explore and try to understand.

Thanks for your thoughts! I suppose the counter argument to patience is that pessimists might not feel we have a lot of time left, so it’s a now or never scenario in their mind. If we have deep time ahead of us, then there’s really no urgency.

This is one subject where the cautious view has very negligible downsides, we wait a little longer. The optimistic view however courts species extinction level threats with very low probability of an unqualified positive result. The space hippie view of the world ignores the very basic nature of existence, competition and aggression seem to be universal in every living being, considering that has to be the base line assumption just hoping the other side is excessively altruistic even to completely alien lifeforms is so far beoynd naive it isn't funny unless proven otherwise. The risk reward scale isn't just tilted it's nearly vertical. Even then if we were to turn out to be the more advanced and aggressive side it would be even More imperative to know everything possible before contact to ensure we do not commit hasty mistakes at the expense of someone we would actually like to know.

@@CoolWorldsLab Sending out desperate messages into space as a last act of existence seems really pathetic to me. But I don't see any likely near threat that will wipe out all existence anyways. Climate change? No, it really isn't that dire. Nuclear war? Terrible, but survivable buy a remnant. Perhaps the scariest is a bio-engineered virus.

welcome to the "dark forest"

All _they_ would need to do is push asteroids at us.

because you don't know Curiuss

Same

My list is: Cool Worlds In a nutshell Vsauce Veritasium 👌😉

this is not my favourite channel

This is easily my favourite comment on UKposts

And this comment is precisely why the METI critics keep hearing the criticism "you've been reading/watching too much science fiction"-- its because it seems to be true. Cool Worlds mentions a lot how the METI proponents must do a lot of speculating on xenopsychology, but does not acknowledge the reverse-- that in fact all the speculation is from those who propose hostility from aliens, not the other way around. It makes for a good story, but as speculation goes, its fundamentally just an appeal to ignorance. Why would they be listening in the first place if they fundamentally fear the unknown universe around them, for instance? How could they manage world peace among their own when they have such an aggressive nature? How have they managed to stay alive despite all the other existential risks that a technological civilization brings upon itself, especially a warlike one? They can easily do the calculations on the Drake equation as well and realize that they must be surrounded by a universe teeming with life; even the conservative estimate for the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy based on the equation says there must be half a dozen of them in the Milky Way including our own. If they fear those civilizations, or think they can exploit those civilizations, they must realize that there are too many to fight them all. Which is the first unremarked upon problem with the argument. Its not actually a two player game; there are as many players as there are civilizations watching the skies for technosignatures. What is the technosignature for an interstellar war? If one or more signatures of interstellar war can be identified, then certainly the hostile civilizations can be identified by their acts and not just their transmissions. Which means the problem becomes self-policing. Hostility is a bad survival strategy, because all those civilizations who are peaceful but fear annihilation have reason to attack any civilization seen to be automatically aggressive for no rational reason within the parameters of the game. They need not be acting out of altruism if they act to protect another civilization; they need merely recognize that aggressors need be removed from the game. Thus the game theory analysis seen in this video is incomplete. Moreover, if we can see evidence or lack of evidence for interstellar war, then we can evaluate the risk more accurately. If we see no evidence for such wars, then we can safely assume the probability of being victimized is so low as to be nonexistant. Perhaps the distances are too large to make any war feasible, or perhaps too large to make any civilization who could do so think they are threatened or even inconvenienced by those civilizations sending messages but not ships across interstellar space. Or perhaps we need to add in more terms to the equation for all the other existential risks that threaten our civilization and weigh them against the relative risk of messaging other civilizations. I think we its important to recognize that all of the biggest known risks to our civilization right now are internal to our civilization (think climate change or nuclear war), while the risk of alien civilizations is quite literally unknown. Lastly, the analysis is incomplete in a third way. Any interstellar war would take centuries or millennia if the rules of relativity are assumed to be a limiting factor; most of the same scientists who oppose METI seem not to consider things like wormholes and warp drives plausible, so I think its fair to make this assumption. In which case, the threat of annihilation by an alien civilization is centuries if not thousands of years into the future. Which begs the question: how advanced are they when they receive the message, and how advanced will our civilization be when they arrive? Even if they have a head start on us, which we cannot know, our survival in such a scenario is unknown because we cannot know how far our own technology will progress in that time. It may well happen that the hostile civilizations stagnate because they throw so many resources at engaging in war while we rapidly progress into a civilization beyond their ability to exterminate, or even into one capable of turning the tables on them. If you like digesting this in science fiction form, I suggest the internet short story "We Know You Are Out There" to see how badly this can work out for an aggressive civilization who miscalculates the risk of attacking a civilization when they fail to account for the advancement of the "lesser" civilization in this scenario.

The three body problem

@@MIKE_THE_BRUMMIE thats the first book in the series, and in which the premises of the dark forest were not presented. So OP is correct.

I believe the premise is faulty

I'm not convinced that aliens would be malevolent. But I am convinced that the price for being wrong is too high to risk it.

Amen … 20+ years traveling in Air Force …. retired from there … then 25+ years working/traveling for Electromagnetic R&D Lab at OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY …. SETI, New Horizons Probe to Pluto ….. retired …. then a few moron electronic jobs working with/for morons ….. just retired retired now Bring on the Aliens …. they deserve this place Jim “RADARMAN”

It is a good phrase. I've been merely surviving for quite a while and I'm just really tired. Honestly I'm in a place where i find my existence as unnecessary and unwanted. Unwanted by myself. For me future is empty

@Terra Nova You are in charge of yourself, be your best you, who can stop you? Yourself, reach higher!

​​​@@AmyFlannigan27 "unwanted and unnecessary" interesting way to put it- a bit romantic and melancholy. I call BS, sir. There's something inside you that's hungry and it's not getting fed. When a person is starving it can drive them to the point of mania and suicidal ideation. You need to be fed. Whatever it is you're craving make sure you get a taste. Not everything has to be on a grand scale. Atm I live a very boring life, but there's also comfort and security in the routine and predictability. I have big plans though. I'm going to travel to a country I've had my eye on. I'm currently learning the language. I'm not an experienced traveler, that's why this trip will be appreciated even more. It's going to take me about 3 more years to be financially, linguistically, and emotionally ready for the trip. So for the next 3 years it's just going to be my boring life as I continue to prepare for the feast. I will be fed.

Live on sister☀️

Bold of you to assume aliens have never fought wars.

The fact we built nuclear technology is a sign of intelligence. Just not the good kind

But I agree.. it's stupid being in conflict with each other.

​​@agni3743 , ​nuclear technology is a broad term, as it includes nuclear energy alongside nuclear weapons. It's the creation/development of the latter that is a sign of a potential malevolence of our kind.

@@amenoyoni thanks for the clarification. Then I guess nuclear weapons would make a bad example for human intellect. Our old man Oppenheimer never thought the consequences through. Still it did have a lot of contribution in today's nuclear technology.

I play Stellaris too! How cold and lonely it must be, to face the darkness of space alone.

Woot!!👏🏻

You just want to farm likes.

Agreed.

So true.

^Retweet …wait, wrong app 😂

An intelligent civilization will not follow the path to colonize the whole galaxy, which exhausts the resources quickly. Their own variations/colonies risk turning into enemies of each other if communication lag is say just even 1 month, meaning they are 1 light month apart. A galactic level civilization who can't communicate faster than light is impossible. We think that a rebel in a super intelligent civilization can still colonize the galaxy. But rebels cannot do that, it require civilization level of effort. An intelligent civilization will understand not only how to win a competition but also how not to create a competition.

Exactly. Lets just be frank. If we tell aliens we have strictly peaceful intentions, it would be a lie. How many wars are we currently fighting? How many of our national leaders are using murder as a political tool?

When a guest is coming to visit it's typically the case that one cleans their house. Often the existence of a 3rd party can cause one to examine their own behavior with a new outlook. Others that seemed so different now look just like you do. Humanity could be embarrassed but often being embarrassed is a catalyst for changing that behavior. Overall I'm not sure I buy this argument of having to fix ourselves first.

@@justintime5021why would any advanced civilization, or really any civilization period, want to come to a planet ruled by apes with nukes that kill each other for no reason other than to pursue violence? We aren’t rational predictable creatures. If they don’t have a concept of emotion and perfectly understand all of ours (they almost certainly won’t) all they see is dumb apes killing each other and destroying their own planet. Your house should always be clean. It’s just a facade otherwise for when the guests come over.

Make Aliens Great Again could be a new NASA initiative.

Tell us Professor, how much energy you need to send a short (10 words) message to Alpha Centauri (4.37 light years)

Well said, taking words out of my mouth but only much better wording. Too late for a 69 years old man but it’s never too late to still be curious. Thanks so much David.

One of my favourite channel and host!

Haha same! His channel and the three body problem series have turned on a switch in me to finally pursue a masters in applied statistics and data science at 31! I hope one day to use it to help us understand our world better

Nope

It really doesn't matter wether or not we send messages out there, because Earth has already been broadcasting the existence of life on it for billions years.

@@skynet5828 that's true but not like dead direct to massive galaxy's or even smaller close star systems in our own. It's alot harder to pick up background frequency and be able to tell exactly what star it cane from. If we send a message to a star system or amother galaxy it's like they are getting hit with a big flash and we'll be standing right in front of them like a cop with a flashlight in theyer face.. lol That's basically the difference between them.

​@@skynet5828 yep and intelligent life for over 100

@@skynet5828 - true, but there is a meaningful difference between sentient and non-sentient life, and even more so with intelligent life.

We're the Florida of the galaxy! LMFAO!

​@@bryanwhite4245 💯🤣☠️

Exactly. Like getting a haircut, my barber says "I can always cut more off, but I can't put it back on"

Your last sentence sums it up nicely. Also see my post above.

What if the reason for the silence is civilizations end up destroying themselves in the pursuit of knowledge? Maybe our survival depends on turning back from our curiosity instincts and stopping the chase of the unknown.

@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368Well, that doesn't particularly make sense in this regard, ...there's no reason to stop looking: if a lot of civilizations destroyed themselves with, say, soome new tech, then we might see the remains as a warning, or someone *else* might even take the trouble of broadcasting one if they'f seen it happen. Head in the sand sure would help that.

True. We should wait until we know way more. Because God knows, in 200 years time we certainly aren't going to learn a ton more and then say "Eh, we should wait till we know more."

There is no scale of preparedness when dealing with complete unknowns in technology.

Perfect thinking!

@@AndyOdin22it’s not like a civilization will invent radio communication thousands of years before advanced weaponry, any civilization capable of receiving or sending messages is likely much more advanced as we aren’t too many years away from the invention of radio

Deffend from what ? If you don't know what is out there ? How can you know your deffences are enough ? But don't worry, Aliens would be able to see us in great detail many centuries before they were able to reach us

Totally correlate’s !! In absolutey no way what so ever

Monkeys on motorbikes sounds like a great idea!!! I'd pay to see that

@@EricDKaufman Hmm, don't we already have those?

@@JoshuaDasilva-mm8qq Ofc it does... why would a interstellar civilization try to help us out? we are literally killing ourselfs while destroying the planet and you think they won't just kill us to get resources? it would be like the Qu's from all tomorrows, there won't even be a fight, we will all just die in weeks and they will gather all resources. The whole 3 world problem is related to the idea that aliens just decide to kill all humans when they finally understand that all humans are somewhat corrupt and lie, kill, steal etc.

Your analogy completely fails. We are already in space although it's the first step. I don't see a monkey constructing a bicycle or a wheel for that matter... We are also far more complex as a civilization. While the monkey barely has a civilization. I don't see why it would be such a far fetch to show a monkey who was making a wheel to show him the option of a bike.

👆

Also been reading 3Body, really makes you think a bit deeper about the advantages of contacting other worlds

I think that once they know that you are there if they have the capability to come to you then it isn't up to you, it's up to them. The kind of person, or civilization that would respect your lack of an invite is also not the kind that would then annihilate you. The kind of civilization that does annihilations wouldn't much care about your invite in the first place. In the end, I think that this a situation for us like Imperial Japan, closed off and isolated out of fear, maybe even some legitimate fears, but ones that are far from outweighing the benefits of contact with the outside world.

“Lurk more” is generally good advice 😅

Sending out messages to the cosmos when you have no idea about the receiver is a dangerous risky endeavor. Read 3body. Loved.

@@atashgallagher5139 Whilst I mainly agree with you I would like to note that the accidental broadcasts don't necessarily convey how far developed we are. A direct invitation would not only give them a better idea of how advanced we are but also show that we probably won't shoot on sight, except for bait of course... so it's a big risk to actually attack someone I just noticed.

Godier fucking rules, dude!

@@jamessullivan4391 thanks, i was wondering who jmg was. i probably missed this video yesterday because i was watching event horizon! 😄

There is a slight difference in level of both. Also, JMG is more of a wellinformed dreamer while the people at cool worlds are true scientists. Especially Godier's guests are often quite questionable. This here is always pure science

@@bertdemeulemeester Your Mom is questionable.

@Bert - Actually, both are scientists, it's just that John Godier is primarily a futurist, whereas David Kipping is a planetary scientist.

"My personal thought is that we should engage in METI." please don't call it personal thought since it's clear you don't have that going for you "to name a few I'm leaning towards the rarity of life and the short lifespan of a civilization so I would agree on sending a message that will probably being received while we are no more, so for legacy." ok that's irrelevant to any threat opportunity calculation, the only thing lifetime of civilisations impact is on the threat probability and it only reduces it, and it's irrelevant anyways because the metric of civilisational lifetime probability does not matter here, what matters is the binary existence of a threat or not "so I would agree on sending a message that will probably being received while we are no more, so for legacy." great so you want to kill me and everyone else for something you don't plan to get anything from, you're just a treat aren't you? what a splendid example of mankind you are, "yes let's just take the worst possible option while being too stupid and lazy to do any of the ground work needed to understand the conundrum and assess the proper strategy to undertake, all to do something that has absolutely no value not to me nor anyone else, doing that thing that has no value is well worth destroying humanity" that's you, you are hilariously defective and annoyingly dangerous, if you know you're too stupid to think properly and arrive to correct conclusions you should really just stop, and if you didn't know that well I'm here to tell you, so you really have no moral excuse for opening your mouth anymore

Great analysis. I'd like to add that we're not worth annihilating, it's not as if space is low on resources, that is until we discover interstellar travel, start expanding and stepping on someone's toes, like spreading our germs or becoming a nuisance in one way or another. Even then it would be sufficient to confine us to our own solar system, shooting up any ships that try to leave and... we'd get the point eventually. In addition, I think an overly hostile civilization would have lower probability of reaching a phase where they control the galaxy, or part of it, you'd have to be relatively benign not to exterminate your own species long before that. Moreover, it is my feeling that we've been spotted a long time ago and are being watched. Of course there's the possibility that we're actually early and are already the dominant species in our galaxy without knowing it, but I wouldn't bet on that one. Either way I don't think we have to worry about any of it before going interstellar - that would be the moment we'd be stopped, welcomed or taught the rules.

sonicindustries What a load of shit. Why would we need to be sending out messages when the aliens are ALREADY HERE? Duh. The government knows all about it ad¡nd has covered it up for seventy years

70 years you say Tim? Wow! I’ll look forward to you presenting your evidence in public..

@@sonicindustries227 You like believing in religion don´t you? Fairy stories. a supposed virgin birth, a God that loves everybody but lets millions die of Covid, not I´m afraid it was show by at least three laboratories to be from the 14th century

Lol. You’re just winding us up now Tim.. You know the earth’s not flat right?

For you it is, you should have added to be slightly more precise. First about 14min were nothing overly original I'd thought, repeated same rather standard arguments as in many other videos. But later indeed it got more interesting.

The Dark Forest *idea* is the part that keeps me from taking the Reemergence of Earths Past trilogy seriously. it works as cosmic horror because horror is not rational, horror is about fear but when you apply logic too it it falls apart because it is not logical. Why would a species thousand if not millions of years more advanced than us fear us? There would be far bigger and more immediate threats to them and we would be thousands if not millions of years away from being a threat to them. It strikes me as a continuation of the idea that humans are special, that the Earth would be the capital of the Federation or the Galactic Empire would be run by Humans. It is a human centric idea, it is the idea that humans are big and scary rather than aliens looking at us and saying "How cute, they think they are interesting. Boooooring, lets look at the Qitchuchalfatq they are actually interesting. Ignore the humans, they're mostly harmless. They are a much bigger threat to each other than us"

I am a huge proponent of the Dark Forest Theory but it only works if there are a lot of older, advanced civilizations out there. What is eerie is that Kipping had a video showing that if life out there does exist, then statistically we are surrounded by older civilizations. But all that depends on life existing outside Earth, which so far we have no evidence. So as of right now, all our statistical models are zero, or pure speculation.

Waiting for the Professor to address this as well.

@@clwho4652 All the analogies involving humans and ants (farmer and turkeys in The Three Body Problem) supposes a similar delta (approaching infinity) between humanity and ETI. The fact that ants and turkeys lack self-awareness, scientific principals, and mathematics, etc, means the delta between us and ETI is finite, and therefore should be of interest to ETI.

@@echen71 Unless we bring nothing new to the table. If intelligent aliens are rare than yes we would be interesting just by the fact that we are a rarity, but they'd be too far away to even know about us and communication would likely be impossible due to distance alone. If intelligent aliens are common, what new or interesting things do we bring? What if our stories, or history, even or biology has been done before and in more interesting ways? What if we are an ant colony in the middle of the woods, in an aria that contains nothing of value, and no one goes to? What if we are one of thousands of ant colonies in a region with plenty of space for everyone? And maybe there is an ant city fifty miles west of the woods where far more interesting things are happening.

Thanks for that comment, it’s really great to hear our work is having impact

@@CoolWorldsLab , I so look forward to your videos. They expand the universe for me. Channels like yours have made it so I can't stand what is on television. TV pales into crass nothingness by comparison.

I simply love the thought experiments.

When death is on the line, it’s impossible to be too cautious

They're already here though is the thing

@@JamesTaylor-on9nz Any intelligent space aliens would quickly learn humans can't be trusted because of our long history of ongoing wars, corruption, lying, stealing and violence. These facts would instantly catapult the human race into a threat category thus resulting with the "best case scenario" where the powerful aliens would be controlling and limiting our expansion in the galaxy.... and there's dozens of scenarios much worse.

@@NTJedi You're right, although I don't agree with the implication that aliens would somehow be more moral or have a much 'cleaner' history than humans. Everything humans do (good or evil) is in an effort to compete for resources, which are finite. Animals also eat each other, kill each other, use deception both to hunt and to survive, kill the cubs or offspring of other members of the same species, not to mention parasites... That's just nature, and humans are a part of nature, and aliens presumably are too.

"but maybe I care about staying alive too much" ok what? no you don't

You don’t need an A.I. to realise governments are here to extract money from you and vast majority of people who are involved in politics are psychopaths. Good luck reasoning with them. The only way to get things better is to change the conditions which attracts these kind of individuals who prey on others.

Not difficult these days but still a good point.

Anything is better than BBC science documentaries...

@@godfreyofbouillon966 lmao

Our radio signals degrade over distance to the same as background radiatiion. 1megawatt wide band about 1 billion km. 1mw narrow band about 30 billion km. So a very strong signal of 1 megawatt very narrow band will not be discernable at proxima centauri. Entire article from astrophysicist: It just keeps getting fainter, until your receiver can’t distinguish it from the background noise. But let’s do a numerical example of something like a large broadcast station, radiating a megawatt. What’s the signal strength? Typically you’ll work in terms of a Watts/square meter/Hz of bandwidth - Let’s assume that the station has 10 kHz bandwidth - so it’s radiating 100 Watts/Hz. That spreads as a sphere with surface are 4*pi*r^2. So, at 1 million km (not too far away), the sphere is about 12.6E18 square meters - the spectral flux density is then 100/12.6E18 W/Hz/m^2 -> 7.95E-18. (-171 dBW/Hz/m^2) Now, let’s ask “what’s the smallest signal we can detect against the noise?” In general, you’re going to be working against the cosmic background radiation, which varies with frequency - but a good approximation is to assume it is at 3 degrees Kelvin and uniform in all directions: Boltzmans constant is 1.38E-23, so multiplying that out we get about 4E-23 W/Hz/m^2 or -224 dBW/Hz/m^2. So, at a million km, the radio station is 53 dB stronger than the background noise. So let’s move farther away - it goes as inverse square, so if we move out by a factor of 1000, to a billion (1E9) km from earth, the radio station is now at -231 dBW/Hz/m^2, which is below our noise by about 7 dB. This would make it very difficult to detect. Now, if you wanted to make a signal that can be detected easily, you’d make a very narrow band transmission - Above, I assumed the radio station was essentially random noise with 10kHz BW. If we transmit just a narrow carrier (

There were indeed massive risks in every step forward our species has taken so far but not a single one of them have come anywhere close to alerting a malevolent technically advanced alien species that was within its travelling distance we are just as likely to detect alien civilisations by techno signatures as we are by randomly sending out messages into the vast recesses of space and it's far far less risky!

@@dazm901 just because stupid humans who are the masses choose to live.emotional, violent, selfish, greedy, egotistical, idiotic, moronic, and insecure lives and even on earth even morons who clearly see the obvious instinct of fear, terror, and helpless in the eyes of animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, horses, lamb, and fish, and still decide to kill them by the billions for land+air animals and trillions for sea animals just for a worthless made up paper they imagine has value, doesn't mean aliens would be just like us and come down and get emotional like us and easily get violent, or farm us and rape our women so they steal their milk, and breed us to have lots of muscle and be tall for maximum amount of meat. No. This is just something ignorant, greedy, selfish humans do. Aliens look down at us like we look down at animals even though we are animals and aren't too far ahead of them. Humans born in the wild outside society are no better or superior than any animal on earth and are equally strong and vulnerable. Aliens see our planet and pass it once they see how stupid humans are because they choose to fight each other over whos ego and penis is bigger and accept wage slaves rather Than unite together and make sure everyone is at peace, ans always fed or taken care of, and live our lives to its fullest potential without the handicap a monetary and greedy society causes . aliens would not want anything special from us or our planet as the universe is filled with far more elements they need than on earth. They'd look at us like how we look at stupid monkeys.

@Daz M a genuine question to your comment: isn't that assuming that whoever is out there to receive doesn't have the technology to "raise" the noise floor meaning they could pick it up from further away than we could?

If you manage to find it, please read my comment. It explains everything. You are correct sir about exploration: we need to move fast and colonize the adjacent solar systems if we want to survive as species. We also must do it in silence, without being noticed by others, if any. Our time is limited. If we don't manage to become a type 2 civilization, we'll be extinct in less than 500 years. For this to happen, our best hope is the AI and the automatic colonization of space.

I don't quite understand how being a 'survivor' of Northern Ireland is in any way equivalent to the METI/SETI argument. As a person with family from South Armagh you should have tried being a civilian there during the Troubles. You knew what your enemy was even if you didn't know where they were or what they were planning, and that's to take nothing away from you, you did a very difficult and incredibly dangerous job there. If I were to use an analogy sending out messages to potential aliens in far flung parts of the galaxy we may have identified as most likely to harbour life is like having sent out messages for talks that eventually led to peace to people seen as terrorists beforehand. To think if there are aliens out there with the ability to destroy us, which could well be true, to think they couldn't detect us and wipe us out without a message from us to know for sure we are here is just being arrogant and an excuse for not sending out messages. In the end though it is risk versus reward. If these kind of aliens exist that could travel the vast distances, so vast that we can't even comprehend (our Voyager spacecraft sent out in the 80s have only just reached the outer limits of our nearest solar system and would take thousands of years to reach the nearest star, and the technology hasn't changed that much since then) then they would surely have been nearby or even to our planet in relative terms. The truth is that any signal sent out now would only reach most stars in thousands of years, and those few stars we are targeting may not even have intelligent life anyway. The reward though of making contact might far outweigh those of not, as well as satisfying our immense curiosity of knowing that we are not alone. Of course there are risks, but if there are great powers out there willing to just eradicate civilisations out there just when they show they are curious then we are being very naïve and have watched to many science fiction movies where we apply human characteristics to what may be very different civilisations that are nothing like us without any of the history we've been through as a species.

@@mattpotter8725 It means that I survived active service in what was a war zone, so I have experience of being in a perilous situation and do not wish to be put in such a situation again.

Exactly! To start purposefully blaring our location & existence to the void when we've had 0 S.E.T.I confirmed cases of ET activity. Putting our entire species in Mortal Danger ( and don't wave that away, we are risking EVERYTHING!) due to the actions of a few short-sighted idealists who want to be the ones to discover aliens so badly they're* actually willing to gamble the entire Earth.... Like WTF? Can someone please check the backgrounds of these M.E.T.I ppl and see if they all have horrible gambling addictions? Lol Edit: sorry typo I'm very strict on my there, they're & their usage lol

@@ericcloud1023 Mortal danger?!!! Lol. You do realise how vast the universe is don't you?

Against metí. If you look at our culture as humans, what is that we do best? Fight for resources. Whether for food or housing. If we humans become capable of going to other planets to colonize. We will continue the same fight. And the only real reason we would want to contact is to advance ourselves to do just that. So it is safe to say the other side will do the same.

Aren't they mesmerizing!💖👏👏👍👍👍

My two favorites as well!

Yes to both. Like minded.

One of his excuses just quoting one of the James Bond movie line.

I see what you did there

Your brain will explode when you read just a few pages of basic Greek Mythology if you think that's so profound.

They've been here for a while already

Might be the case, but personally I think we just happened to be in an isolated part of our universe and that isolation is causing us to make such a big deal out of finding life outside of our planet, it's possible we've already been detected but discovering us just wasn't anything interesting to whatever discovered us, and I don't think there's anything worth it in our little bubble that can't be found elsewhere in the vast expanse, so there's really no reason to come here unless you're bored or desperate

@@wolfstorm5394 Well, if you want my serious answer, I think people simply underestimate just how incredibly unusual intelligent, technologically advanced alien societies probably are. Sure, _life_ probably isn't too uncommon, relatively speaking, since that's mostly just a matter of fortunate chemistry. But advanced civilizations of intelligent sapients? Nah, those are going to be exceptionally rare outliers, simply because that's what we appear to be. Like, notice how no other animals on this planet are building cities and doing science and all that stuff? The number of species to have ever existed on Earth is something like five billion. So, as far as we know, we are a one in five billion fluke. Seriously, there are _so_ many unlikely things that had to happen for us to get to this point. We're practically an evolutionary anomaly. I just don't think what we consider to be "intelligent life" is common at all, and whatever does exist is likely spread too far apart for communication to be feasible.

@@RelativelyBest Good point, and we really only had our chance because dinosaurs and other larger than life predators got roasted by a comet impact, which gave us enough breathing room to evolve in many ways, and we're pretty young in comparison to everything thats ever lived on this planet. So if thats anything to go by then perhaps intelligent life forms are an absolute rarity and we might be among the first

@@wolfstorm5394 It actually gets more ridiculous the more you try to account for all the ways we're kinda weird. Like evolving language, which is sort of a fundamental requirement for developing a culture and teaching each other math and so on. Did you know that chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives, have literally superhuman visual memory recall? Like if you show them a picture for just one second, they can remember every detail without effort. The theory is that we traded that brain function for the ability to communicate abstract information. And evolutionary scientists aren't even sure how or why that happened. See, most animals make sounds that always mean the same thing, like "mate with me" or "stay away." They are inherently reliable signals. On the other hand, the ability to "lie" makes one untrustworthy, so evolution should have selected against it. If it had, we wouldn't even understand the concept of sending messages to other worlds, no matter how smart we were otherwise.

Aliens might find humans to either be very weak or absolutely ruthless depending on how they look at our history and culture which is another reason to avoid Earth

I'm waiting for the book "Why Sagan was a butthole".

it's not just about their past experiences, it's about past experiences and theoretical predictions they make as well, which are all bad when done logically "It's scary but also scary the idea that we are alone." why? Being scared is an empotion humans evolved to avoid danger, if we're alone it's the opposite of scary, no threat, go run around naked in the galaxy you'll be fine, if you want to study or talk to other sapient life forms, don't worry we'll create them on earth soon enough

The Dark Forest Hypothesis explains this best.... the reason the dark forest (Milky Way) galaxy is so quiet is because both friendly and dangerous encounters exist. If you suddenly woke up in the middle of the Amazon jungle... would you make lots of noise with hopes something friendly would arrive?? The weaker friendly animals would run away from your noise... the dangerous hungry animals would slowly begin tracking you.... any wandering bandits would race to your location either killing you or stealing everything on your body.... casual tourists might investigate to help, but might also avoid you, out of fear.... any forest rangers would probably come to help. Based on the dangers which do exist it's unwise yelling for help in the Amazon jungle when you first arrive... the same for Earth.

​@@NTJedi The Amazon jungle is a place where species evolved together to have some benefit from eating each other. The closest equivalent for aliens would be wanting our resources. But any resources could be had closer to home. If they really wanted ours, they could already have come here. If they feared us, they could already have sent a planet cracker. And if they're capable of and interested in destroying us, they would have been able to find out we exist via astronomy or probes long before we intentionally sent a signal. As I see it, the only question is how they interpret the act of communicating itself (or the act of failing to communicate), and there's no way to know that without guessing at their psychology, and there's no reason to assume they'd respond worse to communication than to non-communication.

@@NTJedi I don't think the analogy really scales well, for example would you travel to another continent if someone offered you a free lunch? On the other hand I'd say simply sending a letter to that person would be much more reasonable.

@@GG-bw5qd Any powerful space aliens would obviously review current events in our world and our human history before making any decisions regarding peace, trading, knowledge sharing and rules. Upon discovering the human race has a long ongoing history of wars, corruption, lying, stealing and violence it's clear the space aliens would quickly categorize humans into some 'threat' category. This means the absolute best case scenario of establishing contact with powerful aliens would result with humans being controlled with limited expansion into the galaxy.... and that's the best case scenario with dozens of other scenarios much worse. This means METI could only possibly cause negative results for our human race today.

@@GG-bw5qd I think another point is the weaker animals who would be able to come would still far outpace us technologically, so anyone who is able to actually make it here probably well beyond our advancements, putting us at a disadvantage inherently, being at the whims of whoever happened to arrive. It's a good suggestion though. I think another theory is that the distances are just too vast. We wrongly assume a lot of things so it's entirely possible life is right under our noses too. There's so many factors including the length of time our planet compared to others have existed. For all we know, we could be the very first advanced form of life in this crazy universe. It sounds crazy to even suggest. But SOMEBODY has to be the first, right? Imagine that WE are the "Ancient Aliens" How wild would that be? So it could be that life around us is still forming, making detecting life much more difficult for us. Another theory could be that space is just absolutely ginormous. If you believe space is infinite, then one would have to consider the fact that our observable universe cannot be all there is. By definition, to be infinite means it does not end. It would be quite the oddity to find that a universe is infinite, but in the entirety of infinity, only this observable universe exists. Allow me to scale this down in graspable terms. Consider our observable universe (100 BILLION light years in size, roughly) is scaled down to just a tiny dot on a piece of paper. Now, on that piece of paper, scatter dots loosely (not close to each other) across. Now. Knowing your dot on that paper is 100 billion light years, consider the distance from your observable universe to the next closest one. We're talking trillions, quintillions, possibly even numbers we don't even know exist in distances. Therefore, what shot do we have of detecting those universes? Yet they may exist within this same stretch of space. We would likely classify these as entirely different universes separate from ours, but ultimately, it's all connected to the same dimension we live in, the same space, and not some "totally different dimension" like some people imagine multiverse. But all this being said, I do think there's life within our observable universe all over, we just have to find it! And if we truly are the only ones in this entire observable universe, I'd wage a universe somewhere else certainly has succeeded with life.

any math/ geometry of the galaxy will tell you it doesn't matter

@Skippy Thanks for the inflation

I agree completely.

@@jamescollier3what do you mean?

Exactly! Millions of people died because of a new disease (covid 19) from our own world. Imagine what would happen even if "they" came in peace. One cough, and we're dead. 😉

You would like The Killing Star which predates this work by 15 years. But I totally agree with you. If somebody finds us, it is logical for them to exterminate us.

@@oneshothunter9877 that'll only happens if they have the same biochemistry as us if not then we won't be effected by alien viruses

@@dennisreed6345 Well, yeah, probably, maybe 😬😀 I'm No doctor or bio-something, so I couldn't say. But, I just think a virus is a virus, bacteria is bacteria No matter where ever it comes from.

@@oneshothunter9877 you're biased by our biosphere where every form of life has the same biochemistry

We have not that much to gain but everything to lose by announcing ourselves to the universe. Also, I don't think your Mars ruse would work.

I don’t think sending a signal off of Mars’ would change “their” response much. First off, in terms of universal scale, Mars is super close to Earth. Why wouldn’t a hesitant (aggressive or passive) alien species not investigate our entire solar system before taking any action? Next, time/technology growth. Even if the aliens only picked up on the signal from Earth, the time it would take to reach a civilization light years away makes the idea of single planet colonization unlikely. If I see a signal from 500 years ago, am I likely to think that the sender hasn’t evolved at all? If I, as an aggressive alien, am going to kill this species, why wouldn’t I just destroy the entire solar system? Compensate for uncertainty. And, if the species is passive…then it doesn’t matter at all, so I feel the focus should more be on the possibility of an aggressive one. Now, somehow sending a signal from another solar system…that might work.

Same here. It opened up a universe to me and helped set my mind free from a banal existence. I'm still very angry the universe he loved so much took his life away so soon.

METI is irresponsible. We can revisit in 100 years.

RIP Frank Drake too

@@batonrouge9982: Agree. Physicians tell each other "First, do no harm." Active listening skills include keeping your trap shut. Also, Carl Sagan wasn't known as The Butthead Astronomer for nothing.

yeah the possibilities are endless.. it could be a blessing of technology and wealth, or we could be turned into food.. I say we go for it, if movies have taught me anything Humans will vanquish the 'bad aliens' in the final 20mins!

The trouble is my friend.We would turn it all into weapons. Every Government would want the technology to wipe out the other country. There is too much negativity in this world.

Considering how many people have died as a result of an orphan radiation source being found and tinkered with by them, I think no advanced civilization will just give us their tech. Or, put in another way - give Archimedes a CRT television set and a solar panel to power it, and he'll end up electrocuting himself when he tries to figure out how this bloody thing works.

@@cmdr.shurimal8980 There is that my friend. Thank you.

What's to stop humanity advancing on it's own without other civilisations being involved? Surely if we advance enough, they would take notice anyway...

@@chrisdavie8163 You are so right my friend.