Why do you think we haven’t found extraterrestrial life yet?

r/

I would like to say that I am inclined to the Fermi paradox. Well, or maybe the universe is just so huge that there are lives next to us

Comments

  1. Different-Ebb-7008 Avatar

    Because there isn’t any.

  2. Saintdemon Avatar

    Because it’s next to impossible to detect something as abstract as ‘life’ when you’re observing something from just a few light years away.

  3. Kentwomagnod Avatar

    The universe is big

  4. Omn1Drakon Avatar

    Honestly, I think it’s a mix of technological limitations and the possibility that intelligent life is way rarer than we like to believe. Space is unbelievably vast… we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of exploration.

  5. Own_Tart_3900 Avatar

    Ww haven’t been looking long and hard enough. We need to look for a wider range of possible life forms.

  6. ratat-atat Avatar

    The whimsical answer?
    The gods created us as, but they were horrified by what they created but felt pity all the same, so instead of eradicating their creation, they locked us away in a remote section of the universe, surrounded by a prison of rocks known as the Oort cloud, where we will either thrive, or kill each other in the process.

    Science-ish answer (idk im not an astro-physisict or biologist) a habitable planet (as we know of life) is rare, advanced intelligent beings are even rarer. As all of the species on earth, only Humans have evolved in such a way.

  7. Immediate_Yam_7733 Avatar

    Why we haven’t? Lack of knowledge, lack of technology and lack of information . We’ve been looking for a very very short space of time . As for the other way would you land on this planet ? Hey look I’ve found this cool species that likes to wipe each other out and eat everything else on the planet. Oh wee side note they like to literally destroy the planet they’re living on with no means of getting off . They will fight over almost anything and all go bonkers for this weird shiny stuff that’s absolutely abundant in the galaxy .

  8. Sorry-Programmer9826 Avatar

    We haven’t even gotten outside our solar system. And our best telescopes can kindof make out planets outside our solar system but only if they are really big. It’s pretty easy to have just not found the life that’s out there under those circumstances.

  9. Infrared_Herring Avatar

    We haven’t really been looking. Until we can actually travel between planets and then stars, our data gathering is severely limited.

  10. Healthy_Car1404 Avatar

    Can you be certain we haven’t?

  11. Major_Enthusiasm1099 Avatar

    Because sentient life in the universe is extremely rare. They say there are trillions of stars and even more planets and we still haven’t found life on another planet

  12. Saint--Jiub Avatar

    The universe is big and has a speed limit.

  13. Lumpy-Notice8945 Avatar

    We have actualy looked for life on exactly one other planet: mars.(maybe venus too)

    Its not like we have looked at thousands of planets and concluded that they dont have life, so why would you expect to have found it already.

    And i would not expect to find life on every planet, having two cases in one solar systen is probably already a super rare thing so i would not expect we find much and if we did it might be related to earths life.

  14. kitsnet Avatar

    Anthroplic principle.

    If there were an extraterrestrial lifeform that would have been visible to us in our current state, there would highly likely be an extraterrestrial lifeform that would have made us non-existent in one or another way.

  15. shadowsog95 Avatar

    Space is really big. Like whatever you’re thinking x10000. On the bright side aliens are definitely real. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were aliens on the moon.

  16. ant2tone Avatar

    https://youtu.be/sNhhvQGsMEc?si=7WgyD2AAnQq2bOCl

    You should check out this video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell.

  17. thefooleryoftom Avatar

    Quite possibly because it doesn’t exist in a form we can detect from a distance

  18. ----SD---- Avatar

    There’s more stars (suns) (with solar systems) out there than grains of sand on planet earth. Let that sink in for a second.

  19. Bombg Avatar

    The only life we’ll almost certainly spot is life that can create technology. Spotting planets with single or non technological multicellular life will be almost impossible. It took over 4 billion years for technology that MIGHT be able to be detected to arrive on earth. But life on earth appeared almost as soon as there was the right conditions for it.

    I suspect there is probably many planets with single cellular life, and fewer with multicellular life. Planets with life that can be detected is very likely extremely rare.

  20. Commercial_Tough160 Avatar

    We really can’t see all that far, and everything in space is further away than your puny human brain can really even conceptualize. There could be millions of inhabited planets just here in the Milky Way alone, and we still don’t have the tech to detect them, let alone communicate, purely because stars are not very close at all.

  21. Ok_Orchid1004 Avatar

    Because if it exists its really really far away from us and we suck (so far) at exploring the universe.

  22. TheRavenKnight86 Avatar

    Space race was 60 years ago. We haven’t even been looking in a blink of an eye compared to how long humans have been on earth.

  23. slious Avatar

    1: we are in a simulation

    2: we are in a black hole

    3: the amount of energy to travel the universe does not equal the payout

    4: we are ants going about our animalistic lives, not noticing the others studying us.

  24. Ok-Metal-4719 Avatar

    How do you know we haven’t? I believe in some of the evidence out there that we have.

  25. Radiant_Buy7353 Avatar

    Space is big, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

  26. BreadRum Avatar

    You are on one side of a stadium with a blindfold on. Another person is directly opposite of you lighting a match for exactly 5 seconds at ramdom moments in an hour. You are supposed to take your blindfold off to see if you can see the light.

  27. ControlAvailable8319 Avatar

    I’m not a scientist whatsoever, just someone who’s insanely curious about everything lol

    I think part of the reason is that we’re basing what “life” looks like on other planets, using the standards we have for our own. What if the standard for what is “life” is entirely different on those planets?

  28. McMetal770 Avatar

    Life is extremely unlikely, triply so for intelligent life.

    The universe is big enough that life is certain to have evolved more than once, but life is also rare enough that it’s vanishingly unlikely to have happened more than once in the same galaxy. There is life out there, but not close enough for us to ever notice it.

  29. Delifier Avatar

    The problem lies in the likelyhood of sentient life capable of warp speed. Most lifeforms on Earth is not Even close, and us humies are the closes.

  30. PalpitationDull9182 Avatar

    Have you seen the things dudes put in their ass nowadays?

  31. mountainofentities Avatar

    They are selective about being ‘found’. It happens on an individual basis. One big reason they don’t want to be caught, is one of my recordings says “Humans kill azimoe people” humans kill aliens in other words. I record ufos and very strange voices in the wild. Some call my name. It’s going on around us. Can’t see the forest-through the trees. Their tech allows them to do, seemingly impossible things.

    After seeing a tic-tac ufo in early 2013 (Southern Nevada desert) along with two tall strange people, I went rambo seeking answers, slowly they revealed themselves to me. But people are dumb and have an entitlement attitude without doing the leg work. They (the beings) also see motives too. IE weaponisation.

    I have recorded craft that aren’t not ours -close-to-the-ground. So they have been here a long time. Sadly we are too ignorant and ignore what is going on around us. Ignoring others’ encounters. We ignore phenomena going on here on the earth.

    Frankly people can stay in the dark with their stupid instruments.

    Have to be really hard headed to ignore what has been going on for a long time.

    Think of the legal repucussions of them revealing themselves (for them). Why should they? What is it in for them to reveal?

  32. TrivialBanal Avatar

    Maybe we have. The way we define life is pretty narrow. By our definition, we’re still not sure if viruses count as “life”.

    The way we search for extraterrestrial life is to look for signs of us. We look for radio signals and for atmospheric evidence of carbon based life. We look for amino acids on meteorites and asteroids and in comet tails.

    There could be forms of life out there that we don’t or can’t recognise as life. We would have no frame of reference to compare it to. We have no idea what we’re looking for, so how could we know if we’ve found it?

    Here’s a completely mad example. What if gas based lifeforms existed? What if the great red spot on Jupiter wasn’t a storm, what if it was a city? We would have no way of knowing. No way of testing or even understanding it. In a way, we’re not really looking for extraterrestrial life, we’re looking for terrestrial life on other planets.

  33. Chirsbom Avatar

    Frank & Sullivan who has revised Drakes equation on the probability of life to a probability of advanced civilization that have developed over time in the observable universe, claim that the chance of it only being here on earth is less than 1: 10 billion trillion.

    In other words, its very unlikely we are the only advanced civilization ever to have existed in the universe that we can see.

    Two main variables can explain why we havent discovered any proof of anyone else is time and distance.

    In a universe that is 13 billion years old countless civilizations can have risen and disappeared without us noticing. And in such a vaste space 2 civilizations can exist at the same time and yet not know of each other.

    Given the time the universe has existed and the number of objects in it I find it strange that some would doubt the possibility of life existing anywhere but here on earth.

    That said, it also seems to be just so damn big and we have been looking outwards for such a short time that is also seems strange to think that we would have discovered signs of anyone else out there.

    Maybe if we can keep this search up for a few thousand years we can get a ping of something else. Maybe. In all likelihood we are destined to stay within our solar system, if we can even muster the effort to colonize other planets within it.

  34. Captain-Obvious-69 Avatar

    The window of opportunity while we can explore space vs when space aliens explore space are very, very unlikely to happen at the same time and place.

  35. OT_Militia Avatar

    Who says we haven’t? We believed the speed of sound was the speed limit then Roswell happened and a couple years later we broke the sound barrier. Coincidence? Maybe… How about nearly every ancient civilization mentioning their Gods coming down from the heavens in a fiery chariot? There’s a chance we’ve made contact, but who knows for sure?