"it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"

That just indicates nobody is beaming an uncompressed signal directly at use. Something not on a tight beam directed at us would disperse and get lost in the noise. A compressed data stream would be indistinguishable from noise if since we don't know the compression algorithm and with any kind of interference at all there wouldn't be any way to distinguish it from noise.

Getting a radio signal basically requires there to be an alien race that knows we're here and wants to talk to us.

We may be receiving weak signals all the time that come across as noise, but receiving a message is a different story with specific motivations and efforts behind it.

The universe is old

Actually it's very young, like a baby young compared to what it could be

Life SHOULD exist

That's a very bold statement without any evidence to it

the fact that we haven't found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre

You could call it bizarre if you had some data where there should be a lot of evidence. We don't have that data, just fantasies.

Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.

Likely most of it. Or even our "understanding" as a concept is not there yet. I mean our "understanding" was meant to find food, prey, etc. And we were pretty bad at that.

space big explains it pretty clearly tbh

At the relevant distances, it could be that sending a message that would arrive as anything that stands out above the background noise of the universe would probably require a mono-directional transmission directed at a specific target, which would require a lot of specific effort that a smart enough species may see as not worth the resources. Frankly, we're smart enough to know there is alien life out there somewhere without needing to see it for ourselves, and until our planet is much healthier and our species less chaotic, what would be the point of trying to contact it?

What if it's like us but worse?

And as others have mentioned, a smarter species would likely try to hide, maybe even trying to capture as much ambient RF leaving their planet as they can so we don't find them by accident.

And I guess the AI never actually becomes advanced enough to explore the cosmos itself? Otherwise that would be the alien life we run into, right?

So they get addicted to AI, but it's only marginally better than our shit AI. lmao great.

I can point to examples of many civilizational collapses based on comparatively minor climate abnormalities in the last mere 7,000 years, and can say with certainty the earth has gone at least 5,000,000,000 without being bombarded by even one gamma ray burst.

I think any alien civilization with basic math would prioritize the bird-in-hand.

Other positive things to mention about space exploration:

• If humanity spreads out across the stars, there is less of a danger for us dying from ANY centralized disaster including the cosmic ones and those we might cause ourselves
• Similar to the above, it will be harder to create centralized governments due to extreme distances and just communication limits set by the speed of light; ergo, if some colony falls prey to a dictatorship it is unlikely to spread easily across all of humanity
• We have lots of questions about the universe which may be answered if we travel it. And, when scientific discoveries are made they often have applications outside their initial field.
• We have lots of questions about biology that living in novel environments would teach us (also lots of other scientific fields too of course)
• Forming colonies will force many small groups of people to work collectively, causing those colonies to form a sense of community—something that is lacking in humanity presently
• Isolation caused by communication limits will be scary but also will decrease our access to 24/7 terrible non-local news (inhibiting our ability to doomscroll) which will likely have a positive impact on everyone’s mental health (..maybe not on earth but in the colonies at least)
• Exploration becoming a possibility will also likely make people happier just by showing that humanity has a future. Also, knowing that there are places you can go to escape society all together is quite a freeing thought for some
• Last but not least WE GET TO GO TO SPACE!

Yeah. You don't wanna carry all your eggs in one basket.

Also, it's human nature to explore. Show people a place they can't go and they're going to want to find a way to get there. It's just what we do. We're curious little monkeys.

Wish I had your optimism. I think the Earth is gonna shake humans off like a bad habit if we don't stop climate change. Crop failure will kill everyone, not just poor people.

Ooh do you listen to John Michael Godier by any chance?

He's as rich as he is because people agreed to give him money out of faith in what he claims he wants to achieve.

He's one of the world's most supported humans according to humanity's most dominant merit system.

The ones who hoard all the resources destroy everything for everyone else.

Seems very plausible if other life is like our own.

Seems plausible.

I get the hype about traveling to and living on Mars/Luna/Space Stations, I think. It's that most people are not dedicated to understanding it, they just see cool scifi/scifantasy settings. Star Trek finding neat planets everywhere and some hot women, Star Wars being full of cooperative lifeforms and beautiful high tech worlds, Guardians of the Galaxy slinging through another rainbow nebula with a killer Playlist, and Stargate bringing us to beautiful British Columbian pine forests every week. Even stellar dramas and tragedies all follow the one successful main character(s) that survives, thrives, and entertains us even in the worst of situations. Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, Mission to Mars, The Red Planet, Space Cowboys, Total Recall, Project Hail Mary, and Gravity come to mind.

The key thing, to me, is that all of this feels like someone else already made the situation survivable and the person can always return home. Mars is "right there" in solar system terms. And so often, even when a dire earthly situation is what triggered the movie events in the first place, they tend to be solved by time the protagonist returns. There's no ultimate feeling of loss. It all works out. And I think that's the extent of thought by the gen pop when it comes to space travel. It's survivable and earth is always fixable, because SomeoneElse^TM made it work.

I play a game called Elite: Dangerous. I'm currently 20,000 lightyears from home. It's lonely and empty. For reference, I could make it to a large colony (Colonia, for the 3 ED players) in about 2 hours of game play and make it back to Earth in probably 8. But I don't do that because I want to scan and search each system I jump to, looking for valuable plant life and valuable planets to scan. 90% of the time there's nothing of value. Thats a lot of time looking into an empty bag. And even when I do find something, it's often a long flight to the POI. I generally enjoy it for being a calm game out "in the black", but I absolutely get space madness like Tommy Lee Jones' character in Ad Astra. I keep looking and keep finding nothing. The irony there being one of the movie's "extrasolar planets" was just a normal picture of enceladus, a local moon. The game has many planets that look similar. Nothing! Nothing here! Nothing there!

We are not representative of the common understanding of stellar travel. It looks cool, but you and I know nothing about it will be cool from a living experience. All that's cool is knowing the first people out will provide a ton of feedback to improve the next trip. The next trip, performed by someone else, as the trips will be one-way death sentences for quite some time to come.

I agree with most points except not wanting the human race to survive.

I very much want the human race to survive but to do it in a way that isn't destructive to our planet. Which IS possible.

I think the great filter is more likely a hyper individualistic mindset that creates a "well I lived so why do I care if other lives after me?" Mindset.

You're line of thinking mixed with access to nuclear weapons destroys us all. And that's very likely what will end up happening.

We should all want humans to survive as long as possible BUT be working towards a way that we can do that without being destructive.

Ultimately though yes the end is certain as they say. Heat death of universe and all that (if that's even what happens, no physicist I know of has been consciously there when its happened and able to report back)

But yes. All life animals, plants, humans and otherwise should be kept alive it really is our duty as intelligent beings to facilitate that.

100% agree that we should focus on fixing down here, but very bold of you to assume Fermi, Konopinski, Teller and York, as well as all of the other minds who've wrestled with this question have all overlooked basic physics, chemistry and engineering.

I agree with you, but you fail to account for the absolutely insane people on earth who do dangerous and unpleasant things out of sheer boredom.

Maybe you and I won't go to space, but Stockton Rush's reincarnation will be living on mars in a fiberglass dome covered in their own shit. Given we make it past the global warming filter first.

We're talking about nearly infinite planets, but also an infinite timeline, so while life, even life very similar to ours is likely among those numbers, that it exists at the same time as us and close enough to make contact is just very unlikely unless they are technologically advanced way beyond us and have overcome those factors, in which case they surely could make contact, but seeing the apex predators of this planet behave the way we do, they'd likely feel like we're too far below their intelligence and keep their distance, especially with the fucking morons we keep making rich and famous while calling them "leaders".

It's free real-estate.

It would be worth it if Elon Musk would move there.

No truly cataclysmic events occurred in the last millions of years, so we're probably safe enough.

Fucking up the planet in an anthropogenic way is clearly a bigger concern, and launching giant stuff into space contributes to that.

In other words, maybe later it could be worth it, but only if we solve the problems right here. Otherwise, we won't make it there, either.

With our current understanding, the universe is a vulnerable place. Heat death of the universe may be a thing that's inescapable.

Maybe that’s a filter? Any civilisation that lets itself get trapped in a system of violent control under fear of death gets wiped out by the worst of itself?

Where did the world's richest person get his money? What is money?

Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?

It's not one person that needs to be held to account, dis-empowered, guillotined, reformed and stripped of their ill-gotten gains. It's an entire class of billionaire oligarchs, cabal of political/global elites and exploitative corporations.

*billion

Not quite an immediate concern tho. Maybe for aliens, too?

The Malthusian Theory. Generally considered invalid these days.

I'm thinking when human populations reach excessive densities, some plague will come along and thin us out. We're probably in that zone already.

I see your sentiment, and don't entirely disagree, but if it's at the whim of billionaires, I'd bet there's no chance it's because they want to see humanity flourish beyond this planet. And spacex wouldn't be where it is today without tons of taxpayer subsidies.

It does for at least a few million years...

The urgency is 100% manufactured.