No, rare intelligence and to a lesser extent rare earth remain as convincing as ever. Potentially habitable does not mean life sustaining, and given the lack of strong biosignatures on any of the examined near earth exoplanets, I’d say that there is indeed increasing evidence that life of any kind really is that rare, much less intelligence.
It is just absurdly hard to get conditions right for microbes to form on a reasonable timeframe is a solution after all.
All this time? What like less than 100 years looking only? That’s a blip on the cosmic scale. 100 lightyear sphere of our galaxy is what, less than 1%? With all the theories and possibilities of what’s going on out there, it’s way too rash to start theorizing like this in my opinion.
“Either extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) are incredibly rare (or non-existent), or they are deliberately avoiding contact with us (aka. the “Zoo Hypothesis“).”
There is a 3rd possibility - it may not be deliberate.
Our position in the Milky Way is really out on the ass-end of it. We are nowhere near galactic central. If our current understanding of slower than light travel is correct, it just may not be possible for other civilizations to reach us.
When it comes to communications, and our radio sweeps of the galaxy turning up nothing, well, we’re assuming any advanced civilization is still using radio transmissions.
Look at our recent experiment with laser based communication:
100 or so years after radio communication was widespread, we have the technology to eliminate it. There may be other methods orders of magnitude beyond that. We could be awash in alien communication streams we just can’t percieve because ours are too primitive.
There are also hundreds of other theories that can potentially explain it. Like, 100 years really isn’t a long time on cosmic scales. Maybe we’re late to the party and intelligent life wiped itself out already. Maybe we’re early, and we will wipe ourselves out before a new intelligence even figures out where the copy paper is.
We don’t want to be near the galactic center, there’s too much radiation. A quiet spot out on one of the arms away from supernovae and active objects is a much better place for life to evolve.
At this point our own radio is even too advanced for an alien civilization to detect. An interesting thing about radio is that aside from a few lingering powerful analog signals (AM/FM radio, active radar) our modern spread-spectrum radio is hard to distinguish from background noise. It’s an interesting consequence of information theory, as bandwidth and noise tolerance grow, if you aren’t looking for a signal it becomes almost invisible. We also do a lot with very little power now due to these amazing encoding methods, when I was a kid and the analog cell phone was novel we would have outright said that a phone could never communicate directly with satellites. Not enough power or antenna in your pocket. Yet here we are.
So any civilization that develops radio is only likely to send out a short burst of detectable radio before disappearing within 100 years, even without switching to an alternate technology. This makes radio an almost impossible thing to search for in a vast galaxy where time can separate us even more than space.
I haven’t seen the evidence of ‘water oceans’ out there that are about more than a few water ‘geysers’ spewing from below the frozen surfaces like our breaths on winter mornings.
Whenever I hear the words ‘water’ or ‘life’ in a message from NASA I think, ‘Hmmm… who stands to gain from this PR?’ (At least telescopes return great pix and -other, visible- evidence.)
In case anyone wasn't aware, nearly all space photos that you've ever seen have had their colours tweaked. It's standard practice in space photography. Nebulae and galaxies and planets aren't as colourful as they appear in photos. They do it either to make the features more obvious for study, or just to make them pop more to drum up interest in space exploration. Nothing wrong with it, just be aware that what you see isn't reality but an interpretation.
Really though, I don’t know why it never crossed my mind that the picture of Neptune was so… saturated. It’ll take a little bit to reconcile this new perspective of a “light bluish-green” Neptune. It’s just so jarring to alter a belief held since my childhood.
The latter, I suspect. That’s certainly how forming a neutron star works in the first place, because if a star gets so dense that it can form neutronium then the neutronium (which is far more dense than the core was before) can easily keep making more.
It’s a similar story with black holes. Get past the threshold at which it forms, and the process runs away and swallows the whole star.
If a quark soup is more dense than neutronium, then it would be fairly all-or-nothing
I used to think this idea was kinda silly and based on flimsy and handwavey justification, but then I saw a colloquium by a famous black hole physicist on it. Now I REALLY think this idea is silly and made up!
I’ve seen this pop up a few times, but there are a couple big issues that pop up right out the gate.
Space is constantly expanding with no center. If we’re in a back hole, we and everything else in here are cruising toward the singularity. And if we’re in a black hole, we’re already passed the event horizon, the point at which gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape; and as we progress toward the singularity, that force becomes exponentially stronger… so light from one point inside the black hole would have very limited potential to cross paths with another point… so how is it light from stars is actually making it to us / for the few stars we’re actually in the line of fire for it’s light - if that’s even possible inside the event horizon - shouldn’t the night sky only have a narrow region of visible stars; and shouldn’t they appear distorted as s all hell?
It seems like you are making the assumption that time and the laws of physics follow the same rules inside the singularity. If we ourselves are inside a singularity, the net result was enough matter to create our known universe… but maybe in the next layer down matter behaves differently and stars can be produced on a smaller scale. Or maybe the matter is heading towards its own scale of big-bang. And what if time contracts to the point that the life of the black hole, and its relative size, corresponds to the life of that universe and its expansion?
A story which comes to mind and presents an interesting theory that could apply here can be found in He Who Shrank.
We’d be somewhere between the event horizon and the singularity - once we’ve made it to the singularity we’d just be crushed into it to join the infinitely dense speck of matter.
Between the event horizon and singularity we can still exist as a unique object/entity, we just can’t move any matter/energy from the inside out.
But once we reach the singularity, we just become more mass in the singularity. No more me, or you, or Earth, etc: just singularity.
The time it takes to move from event horizon to singularity would scale with the size of the black hole, so I guess if the singularity had enough mass to generate an event horizon the size of what we understand to be the universe, then yeah the trillions of years it would take for things like Earth to form, life to develop, etc could all happen as we move closer to the singularity, but we run into the snags like the ones I mentioned in my first post - the observable universe would all be on a crash course toward the same point, and not uniformly moving away from everything as space expands; and the further out we look into space, the more distorted it would become: distant galaxies wouldn’t appear as neat discs, but as stretched lines. We could even use that distortion to infer the approximate location of the singularity and gauge how much time is left before we’re smashed into it.
But you’re still judging all of this based on our current laws of physics, or that anyone even knows for certain what is occurring within a black hole. Also remember that time loses all conventional meaning once you pass the event horizon. Now compare that to what we think we know of our own big-bang… that we believe all matter started as a singularity, and that in the initial expansion both time and the very laws of physics were quite muddy and took a bit to settle into what we know today. Within the black hole we don’t even know if the concept of matter still has the same meaning – what appears as a known value of X suns to us could resolve to a whole universe if the physics change.
I’m curious why you think the matter coming it to a black hole would be observed are rushing towards the singularity? We’ve already seen just how insanely that much gravity distorts the perceptions around the outside of a black hole, so why wouldn’t the same be true on the inside? Our own universe has a finite amount of matter, and yet the space it is ‘contained’ in wraps around on itself so there is no center. The boundary of a black hole could potentially create the same result – a threshold that we could never cross, but also a wrapping of the space within back onto itself. Also consider the unknown nature of time, what if all the matter that will ever be consumed by the black hole feeds into that singularity while simultaneously exploding into the life of a new universe? In a place where time doesn’t exist, all of time would happen simultaneously, so from another viewpoint the billions of years (not trillions) that comprise the history of the life and death of our universe could happen all at once. We know that as we look back towards the time of our own singularity the math surrounding time and space break down to a point where they no longer have any meaning. The same is true for what happens inside a black hole, it all breaks down and become meaningless under our current math. Until we know more about what is happening, or find some way to peer back before the big bang, you really can’t discount the idea that what happens inside a black hole could be similar to the creation of a new universe. What appears to us as stringification could be the result of the math showing us the entire history of a moving object instead of a single point in time. Hell we don’t even know if time works the same way, maybe once you cross the event horizon time starts moving backwards and what we see as everything moving towards a singularity appears in there as a universe expanding away from it.
Yes all of this sounds like fantastical sci-fi stuff. Then again, what we know about the birth of our universe and how space and time are warped within a black hole also sounds like fantastical sci-fi stuff, and until we have a better grasp on the nature of all of it, there’s nothing yet that proves or disproves if a whole universe could exist inside a black hole.
I mean, yes I’m assuming they follow the laws of physics. To my knowledge everything about them that we actually can observe does actually follow the laws of physics (including things like time dilation), and we can use what we do know to form a pretty solid hypothesis about what we don’t.
I mean, I could argue that they’re actually c’thulu eggs, and you can’t prove me wrong because we can’t look inside! …but there’s also no evidence to support that. Drawing conclusions about reality based on science fiction is silly. We ofc don’t know everything about the universe, but we should stick with what real evidence actually supports.
Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up, I just feel like we’re still at a stage where the mathematics give us an idea of what might be possible, but that is seriously constrained by our limited understanding of what happens at these grand scales. Without letting your mind wander to the possibilities of what could be, we would never take the time to look beyond what we know. I’m just trying to say that our knowledge of the subject is still greatly limited, and this idea can’t be ruled out completely until we know more. In the meantime, what if someone did seriously explore the notion? Perhaps they’ll find proof that shows it can’t be possible, but perhaps they might also stumble upon a idea even more fantastic.
Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up
That’s what I’m saying though - the hypothesis that we exist in a black hole does contradict the evidence currently available. Or at least I think it does - I opened the contractions initially as a question because this isn’t my area of expertise. I’ve had a few relevant classes, and have a casual interest in the topic, so I think I have a pretty solid foundation at least; but ultimately I’m just a medic, so I was kinda hoping someone with a more dedicated background would chime in.
There’s a LOT of BS surrounding the topic of black holes - and understandably so. They’re intriguing as hell, so it’s no wonder that they’re so often the object of artistic freedom. But all’s fine and well to proclaim that they’re some kind of portal, or mini universe, or cleverly disguised alien spacecraft, or even a sentient creature… in the context of science fiction. But to say any of those about black holes IRL should come with supporting evidence, especially if some aspect of the proposal clashes with our current interpretation of what we can either directly observe or indirectly postulate.
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