Found this a while ago, what are your opinions?

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image showing Found this a while ago, what are your opinions?

7LeagueBoots on January 5th, 2020 at 13:49 UTC »

Lower left. With our current technology we would be hard pressed to detect ourselves at 6 LY out.

We've barely begun thinking about scratching the surface of done any realistic searches and it's massively premature to start making any assumptions other than, "We don't know yet."

Simply put, space is really fucking big and things are really fucking far apart. That makes it exceedingly difficult to detect even "nearby" in our own local star cluster in our own very tiny portion of the galaxy, let alone elsewhere in the galaxy.

skrub55 on January 5th, 2020 at 14:08 UTC »

Remember that we've already found habitable exoplanets, which for all we know are teeming with life, but we have no way to actually take a closer look at them. Remember that earth only has one intelligent, dominant species, humans, we only recently started attempting to contact aliens with signals. Out of billions of years of Earth existing, we've had like 100 years of actually having some form of presence. So what are the odds there is a planet close enough to see or contact, with advanced lifeforms capable of and willing to broadcasting their presence? What if they have similar species to humans but they are technologically behind us by a mere 500 years, a timespan that's long to us but insignificant astronomically. Then they wouldn't contact us or receive our messages, no matter what we tried sending. What if the planets just don't have an intelligent dominant species? Earth has only been ruled by humans for a few thousand years, and there is no guarantee alien life will ever advance to our point, and if it does, what are the odds it will be in a planet near us?

NegZer0 on January 5th, 2020 at 14:14 UTC »

The Great Filter theory actually encompasses the top two entries on the chart as well. That theory isn't about mass extinctions specifically. It is a theory that there is some kind of event or step (or maybe multiple steps) along the path between life starting and becoming a widespread, sustainable civilization and that most organisms never get through it. Mass Extinctions are more of a method a filter might be applied than the filter itself (the filter would be that it is very hard for life to survive long enough to evolve and spread, i.e. the Gaian Bottleneck), but it could also be that life itself is extremely rare (i.e. Rare Earth), or that complex life is, or any number of things that make moving to the next major step extremely rare and difficult.

The Great Filter is more interesting when you consider our species, because we don't know if we already passed it or have yet to face it. My personal suspicion is that it lies ahead of us still.

There is another possible reason why we have not seen anything in SETI as well, which is that time itself is so vast that it may be that civilizations rise and fall all the time on a cosmic scale, but the chance of two appearing simultaneously and noticing each other before they are gone again is simply too low. Maybe the lifespan of even an advanced civilization is only a few hundred thousand years which is a blink of an eye on a scale of billions of years.