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If I hadn’t read too much Hanson over the years I would likely be a true believer in the alien stuff. The issue is it just seems unlikely that “Aliens can visit us” but “we don’t see visual evidence of Aliens colonizing the galaxy”. This has raised my belief that “Aliens have visited us” from almost 0% to .001%.
I think it’s likely Aliens are somewhere out there but I don’t believe they have visited us.
What if Dyson Spheres are low-tech compared to the ultimate horizons of what's possible? Advanced countries leave forests to grow because we don't need firewood for fuel, it's too crappy to worry about. I think we should be looking for alien life in the remaining 95% of the universe's 'dark' matter/energy, the stuff that we can't understand. It's not sufficient to look through a mere 5% and say 'no aliens here, so no aliens anywhere'. That's like looking for gold in riverbeds only, not finding it and going home.
What if advanced civilizations become indolent and ultimately self-extinguishing? What if dark forest? Etc, etc.
If you haven't read 95% of a book, you're not in a position to describe the characters. We don't understand 95% of the universe so “we don’t see visual evidence of Aliens colonizing the galaxy” is not sufficient.
On the other hand, we’ve been looking at what we have and none of it points to alien technology in space. And that makes these sort of arguments specious to me. It’s not a discussion of actual evidence, or even theories backed by theoretical physics, it’s simply hand-waving a lack of evidence and treating all those pointing directly to a lack of evidence as “closed-minded”.
I’ll clearly accept that we haven’t seen most of the known universe. That’s not an issue, I’m open to having my mind changed. But you can’t say “well, you’re being closed minded because you’re not accepting aliens when we haven’t explored everything.” I’m skeptical until the evidence at least exists: a microbe of extrasolar origin, an unambiguously artificial signal, an extra solar artificial satellite, something.
To posit aliens with no evidence beyond speculative statements by people with no expertise in astronomy or physics is in a word irrational. And until we find evidence there’s no reason to take any of it seriously.
My point is not that we need to accept aliens based upon our ignorance but that we shouldn't dismiss them based upon our current, insufficient level of knowledge. Above Sliders said his earlier probability was well below 0.001%. He's very confident and I think he shouldn't be.
Furthermore, there are problems with our current model of how things should work. How can it be so improbable for civilizations to develop that we see no evidence within our entire lightcone? Is it that life is improbable, despite the huge number of stars and planets? Or are we looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?
What do you think our long-term future in the galaxy looks like? Is it really likely that our technological civilization will just poof out with no real impact? (Even the AI doom scenario involves a superintelligence that will start gobbling up the reachable Universe.) This is the argument underlying the Fermi Paradox: we have only one example of an intelligent civilization, and there seems to be little standing in the way of us spreading through and changing the galaxy in an unmissable way. Interstellar travel is quite hard, but not impossibly so. The time scale for this would be measured in millions of years, which is barely a hiccup in cosmological terms. So why didn't someone else do it first?
On a similar note, I'm very confident I'm not standing next to a nuclear explosion (probability well below 0.001%). Am I overconfident? Ok, yes, I'm being a bit cheeky - the effects of a nuclear explosion are well understood, after all. The chance that there's a "great filter" in our future that would stop us and all similar civilizations from spreading exponentially is a lot larger than 0.001%.
Why is everyone stuck with 'changing the galaxy in an unmissable way' or 'the great filter', when we could just be looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?
Why does everyone assume that we have a firm understanding of the limits on an interstellar civilization with massively powerful superintelligences and stellar-scale engineering skills? Maybe if you build a ridiculously huge particle accelerator you can open up opportunities for expansion that make Dyson Spheres look quaint, harnessing or building with 'dark' materials. Maybe if you have quantum gravity and a lot of energy, you can bypass lightspeed limits with some clever warping of space.
I'm not putting limits on anything. The problem with the "ascension" idea isn't that it's impossible - we can't rule it out - but it's that every single member of the ascending civilization, unanimously, would have to stop caring about (or affecting, even by accident) the physical galaxy and the rest of the civilizations in it. Despite a lot of fun sci-fi tropes, ascension isn't some macguffin you build and then everybody disappears. Our modern civilization didn't stop affecting the savannah just because most of us "ascended" out of there. I consider the explanation "everybody's super powerful but also invisible, coincidentally leaving the galaxy looking indistinguishable from an uncivilized one" to be very unlikely. (Not impossible, though.)
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