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Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite.

It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system.

At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic descendants venturing where we can’t.

6 comments

Many see this as the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any society on the path to being advanced enough to potentially leave their system probably gains the ability to destroy themselves before getting to that point.

Short terms issues preventing long term gains.

That is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.

We could be late too, it hasn't even been 200 years since we're technologically capable.

The universe is physically big, which means we'd have a hard time finding life even if it was going on at the same time as us, but add time to the equation and it's game over. There could have been a star trek tier civilisation next door that died 1m years ago and we would probably never know

If a civilisation spreads to stars then logically it will continue to spread (no technology or resource problems) and no event - not even super novas - could stop it (as events could only travel at the speed of expansion)

At that point you don’t have a single civilisation , you have thousands of functionally independent civilisations, with numbers increasing all the time. Sure something could wipe out a civ in one star system, but it couldn’t spread to others quickly enough to affect those others.

The most successful civilisations would continue to expand independently over time to take up all the resources in a galaxy.

Unless they found a way to travel faster than light, which means events could spread fast enough to collapse the civilisations.

Early as in we may have developed before any other civilizations? That's interesting. We're speculating of course, but what would explain us being the first after so much time – 13.8 billion years?

The universe was very hot in the beginning. It took a while for stars to form. Even longer for planets to form. Even longer for planets to cool down. The early universe was a violent place. Full of destruction. After the protoplanetary disk finally coalesces to planets and when planets finally stopped getting bombarded by meteorites, they could start cooling. In the earlier days of the universe there might have been intelligent life supporting planets wiped out by the chaos of the early universe. We might not be the first. But we might be one of the first. We might be early. The universe might have a bright future ahead of itself in terms of intelligent life. This is all speculation of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firstborn_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk

Now you could still say that surely there have been enough time for some advanced civilizations to form. And I would argue that we don't know that. At least we have not detected them, either due our instruments or unwillingness of the intelligent life to communicate to us.

There are of course many other explanations of the Fermi Paradox. But since its all unknown, its basically pick and choose. I choose to pick the nice option. There are however other nice options :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...

Maybe we aren't the first living things to exist in the universe, but the first intelligent ones, and intelligent here meaning creatures with ability to ask these questions and make space probes to explore the universe.

Maybe intelligence isn't always a product of evolution. Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.

A lengthy tangentially related post on my blog if you care -

https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...

> Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.

It is unlikely that other beings becoming intelligent enough to rival us and deny us the supremacy over the planet would ever be allowed. Homo sapiens are believed to have "contributed to" the extinction of several other modern-human-like species (one of them being the Neanderthals). How many other times before could something similar have happened, perhaps far earlier in the evolutionary timeline?

The only way we would allow sufficiently highly intelligent life to develop and flourish is if it is completely subservient to us.

The more entertaining answer from a scifi book. Aliens that developed earlier decided to become isolationist and wanted to stop young civilizations from blasting radio waves at them, so once a civilization became semi-industrialized, they chucked a planet killing rock at them.

I think that’s the question, is 13.8 billion years a lot of time, of not a lot of time?

Earth (and the solar system) is 4.3B years old, a bit more than a third of that, so it's not really that much time in comparison no?

If you assume the heat death as the end point, we're ridiculously early in the universe's lifespan.

Quite unlikely, but if there is a multiverse, everything is possible.

If there isn't a good rationale why it'd be applicable to every civilization that has ever arisen, then it isn't a good fermi paradox solution. Otherwise, if even 1%, or 0.1%, don't fall into the same trap, the galaxy still ends up completely colonized.

One (terrifying) option is we are alone. There is no real reason to believe life is abundant in the universe. Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once. Life may just be so much more rare than we think is possible.

> Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once.

We don't actually know that at all. It could have happened many times and one line won out, it could have been more of a diffuse process than a single event (picture how microbes share genetic material ~freely but even less structured), or there could be a ton of life out there on Earth that's from a completely different tree. We really have very little idea what's living around us.

If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away. Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet. The idea that multiple versions of "life" co-developed and became a single strain is quite interesting to consider. I wonder what else needs to be true to support that theory.

> If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away.

Hm, I don't think it does. The problem is vastly different. Here, on Earth the problem is: sift through all of life for some that's different than the rest. A _hard_ problem with how little of microscopic life we've cataloged completely and with how much of the volume of Earth we can't see.

The problem looking for life in the stars is more: find evidence of _any_ life, so radio signals or chemicals that can't reasonably come from anything else but biology. Those are hard as hell, but fundamentally different.

> Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet.

That would be interesting. I kind of guess it's less likely than some kind of winner-take-all outcompeting thing, but who knows. Life that we see is just very good at spreading, escaping and holding on tight.

Any manned mission in the next 100 years or so to the surface of a moon or planet is basically unnecessary and just to show we can. I am not saying this is a bad thing - but much of the reasons we haven't had manned missions is because it isn't worth it. Robots can do most of what we can do already and what they can't we can do remotely. There's really not a great science reason to send people with our current technology. Robots are already the real explorers.

> Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite.

I've never felt this impulse. To me it's like saying the Earth is 8,000 miles thick but we all chose to live within just a few feet of the surface.

Yep. Ghost in the shell. The robots are just the next stage in the evolution of life..

"we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system."

Given what I see in the past 15 years, I don't particularly see that as a problem, honestly.

"Some say it has already happened..."

Lol

Both Voyager space probes are way farther away than the moon. Is this a reference I'm not understanding?

Parent poster is considering only crewed journeys, surely.