What, it wasn't enough to just gesture meaningfully at the state of the entire godamn planet when looking for reasons why aliens might want to avoid us?

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Couldn't the aliens be the same way?

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago

I mean if they're interplanetary colonizers...

[–] Aux@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The space is huge and FTL travel is impossible. The only reason someone will visit us is if they built a generational space ship. And the only reason to do that is if you have destroyed your own planet and have to colonise another one. We will only see those, who came for our planet and don't care about us.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago

Yup. It's the answer that conflicts with sci-fi, but fits out best understanding of how things work. It's also the answer people don't want to hear.

Also we only know of one planet that has life on it. There's really nothing we can do with statistics with a sample size of one. So it's just as likely that we're the only sentient life in the universe as it is there's millions of of sentient lifeforms out there. That is to say we simply don't know.

But I still like sci-fi where there's a lot of interesting aliens that can fairly easily warp around the universe to hang out. But it is fiction.