I can answer all of the OP's questions in detail but to do so it would upend our civilization and people would question their faith and all that they believe.
I cannot be the one to cause this thus I will have to refrain from answering the OP's questions.

It's more a reflection that humanity is an incredibly violent and malicious organism, it permeates our history and it's what we know, so the fear of being on the wrongside of that history gets projected outwards.

I'm confused.
Radio travels at the speed of light, so it has traveled a radius of 122 light years, right? A diameter of 244 and the volume would be...hugeish. But still a minuscule and the signal strength, as mentioned, gets murdered by the inverse square law.

They've received the signal.
They've labeled it as spam.

From the high desert in the great American southwest ….

I thought that one of the theories why abiogenesis didn't happen more often was Nick Lane's theory was it can only occur in no oxygen or very low oxygen environments. So, after the Great Oxidation Event, it became much more unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?Oumuamua


This sort of thing gives me pause. That and statistical certainty

Interestingly, as our technology improves, our radio footprint in space decreases.  We transmit far more data, but emit much weaker signals.

Also, the great distances make contact with anyone improbable. While we might not be alone, we might as well be.

Actually most of our violence has its roots in our evolutionary nature, and, Walt Disney aside, is reflected in every successful predatory species. Even more fundamental are the iron laws of resource competition bounded by Game Theory.
The marvel is that mankind, quite early on, developed control mechanisms to mitigate that on a steadily increasing scale, from purely kinship selection to tribal mores to codified laws to nation states to international law.
It's nowhere near perfect or universal, but the velocity, spread and refinement are an achievement.

Whether that applies to an alien race, who knows. But I don't find reflexively xenophobic interstellar travelers to be a compelling case given the extreme effort it takes(absent handwavium drive) to cross those distances. The biggest "threat" would be them inadvertently paving over us like we do anthills when we build a freeway, but given the ginormous, literally incomprehensible volume of space, that seems like one of the least likely threats we would ever face.

Kissinger served an infernal master

Wait till they decode Hitler's Olympic opening ceremony speech

And, a planet 122 light years away would be seeing us 122 years ago.

Nothing can travel fast enough for this.

Sorry UFO nutjobs.

There is no evidence that it’s only happened once here.

We only have evidence that it happened at least once.

Thank you. Dark forest makes some pretty big and logically shakey assumptions.

Even at our stage of tech, weve determined that the universe is abundant in resources. Any civ advanced enough to cross interstellar distances to decisively invade or wipe us out has the tech not to worry about things like slavery, energy, or hard resources. In fact, you literally have to contrive a reason for an invasion and slavery to be worth while, like muh unstable homeworld is teh suck, ill take yours cuz it fits us perfectly.

In fact, lets play dark forest. Heres a super legit reason you dont just go offing other races-- theres no guarantee you get them all in one shot and the next thing you know you have several guns from peripheral colony worlds pointed right back at you. Killshot logic is incredibly dicey over interstellar distances.

Dark forest is so full of holes its not funny.

I don't think we are saying anything different.

Though I would like to point out that I think "But I don't find reflexively xenophobic interstellar travelers to be a compelling case given the extreme effort it takes to cross those distances",
is a bit of a flavored opinion because it would appear that humanity will really need to overcome it's baser drives and cooperate to do the same(if it's even theoretically possible to travel that distance.) So, that may be another projection of humanity onto another life form.

Yes they are..I hope someone put a boot or the Club on that Tesla Roadster up there.

It’s an impossible fantasy.

Since this is all a simulation, there technically isn't anyone else in our reality.

where are the green bitches at?

"They're made out of meat."

 "Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

 "Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

 "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

 "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

 "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."

 "Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

 "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

 "No brain?"

"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"

 "So... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

 "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

 "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

 "So what does the meat have in mind."

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."

 "We're supposed to talk to meat?"

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."

 "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

 "I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

 "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

 "Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

 "I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

 "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

 "So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."

"That's it."

 "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

 "A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."

 "Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."

 "They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."


-Terry Bisson, 1991

Aliens are more likely to be interdimensional demons than blue men from the Orion star system.

are you confusing Drake's Equation with Fermi Paradox?  Fermi simply asks a question. and a damn good one at that

so they have no idea how life started or the mechanics of it, but they know it can only occur in low to no oxygen environments... huh

Best I can do.

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Growing up in Phoenix, I saw aliens everywhere. Rural, urban, didn't matter. Hell, a quarter of my high school class were aliens. If you don't believe the aliens are already here, you're loco.

Speed of light is a constant, so if it took 80 plus years for them to receive our broadcasts then figure a way to respond to them would take approximately the same amount of time.  ‘IF’ there is “intelligent” life out there in the cosmos they are either far to advanced to: 1. Care about us due to the huge gap in technology and ignore us (kind of like Star Treks prime directive) or 2. They themselves are primitive even by our standards and either have no capacity to receive our broadcasts or wouldn’t be able to respond anyway.  Space is incredibly vast and every second that goes by it’s expanding at astronomical speeds thus diminishing the chances that can receive or reply to our signals.  Alien civilizations much more advanced than ours could have come and gone extinct even before our sun first ignited and the galaxy or the entire universe could be littered with the ruins of once great space ferrying species and we will most likely never know.  To be honest, I wouldn’t mind having humanity get to at least a 1.5 or higher type civilization before we meet the little green men from the depths of space simply because if they can get here we would have absolutely no hope of defending ourselves from being on their dinner table or be destroyed for our resources even though most of what is on earth is pretty common everywhere out there.

Imagine the smartest guys on an isolated Pacific Island in World War 2, having never seen an aircraft, and standing around and watching a B29 fly over and then arguing about what it was, and where it came from,  based on their knowledge of science and physics up to that time.


That's us right now.

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Wake up with a sore arse OP?

contact sighted!

Sure something can.

The speed of sound was a barrier because lift was used as propulsion ( prop ) but as the speed approached the speed of sound drag increased exponentially. We over came that by inventing propulsion that pushed Mass out the back end instead of using lift and drag.

The speed of light is a limit because we push mass out the back end and as the speed of light is approached, mass increases exponentially.

So all we have to do to break the speed of light barrier is to produce thrust by a means that doesn’t spit mass out the back end.

I will figure it out eventually.

They wouldn't have stayed hidden for so many years if they could have measured up so to speak with the locals.

This is a great thread so far. Excellent knowledge, I appreciate it.

I think there are people answering one of 2 questions:

1. Are there aliens?
2. Could we communicate with aliens?

Two different questions.
For me; yes, no.

They have been here for a long  time.

This.  There are way too many videos out there of objects that defy all known laws of physics.  And not only that, the oceans are largely unexplored.  They could have an underwater base here for all we know.  Now the aspect of how religion plays into the whole alien thing is complex for sure.

Yah RIGHT.  There are TRILLIONS of fucking GALAXIES with BAJILLIONS of fucking PLANETS!

link?  never seen such

Guys that are mad about others believing in aliens are the same guys that would have burned you at the stake for saying the world is round.

Ok so how do we take a picture of the Milky Way from ten bajillion miles away?

Or is this a composite rendering based upon what we see from earth

If there are "aliens" it's whoever or whatever is running the simulation we're in. "Space" is just the fake backdrop that we can't reach.