First-known interstellar Solar System visitor 'Oumuamua a comet in disguise – research The cigar-shaped 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object in recorded human history to whizz through the Solar System, is a comet after all, a pair of astronomers declared in research published in Nature on Wednesday. In 2017, 'Oumuamua captured the imagination of scientists and space fans with its peculiar characteristics. It …
OK, I'm laughing ... but I think when you study the existence and history of life on our planet and the rest of our solar system, then the chances of life in the universe is 100% ... but mostly only microbes, fish, and plants. We've been searching for the possibility of intelligent life in the universe for years now and have only once seen what might be a slight chance but has no evidence ever since. So it looks like the possibility of intelligent life is so small that I suspect if any aliens saw us then they would be far too excited to fly past us quietly.
No idea why you think fish and plants are simple.
If you have fish you are 99.9% of the way to intelligence - all intelligence needs is macroscopic multi-cellular life (fish definitely qualify) and an environmental niche which needs intelligence to fully exploit, and time, possibly lots of time.
Not saying that last 0.1% is easy but in evolutionary terms the jump from lungfish to people is trivial compared to the jump from stromatolites to sponges.
I only see fish and plants as simple because I look at the way that we, and other animals, evolved to walk. We have evolved, but there is very little fossil evidence of intelligence longer ago than a hundred thousand years. Certainly other intelligent life in the Universe could be unique, basically we have no evidence, only guesswork as to what may exist although one potential factor is that we see the Universe as created by a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago ... initially as a fireball that exploded and planets and life probably taking a few billion years to appear at all.
I wonder if the initial creation of our Universe might have been a result of a total collapse of an older Universe about 20 billion years ago.
The first creatures to walk on land were fish.
Obviously there's no fossil evidence of human type intelligence, it takes longer than the genus has been around for fossils to form. But some cephalopods and cetaceans exhibit intelligence and they are found in the fossil record.
You may also want to update your cosmological knowledge, theories of the very early universe are being updated on an almost daily basis now with JWST probing further back than any previous instrument.
"but there is very little fossil evidence of intelligence longer ago than a hundred thousand years". A significant level of intelligence is required to fashion stone tools to perform particular tasks (rather than just picking up a rock or stick to to bash something). Oldowan tools are at least 2.5 million years old, and include Hammerstones that show battering on their surfaces and stone flakes that were struck from stone cores. Well formed handaxes go back at least 1.7 million years. Oldowan (Mode 1) tools have been found from between those dates in East Africa, Asia and Europe. Little evidence of other tools involving sticks or animal products exists because they would have to be fossilised, a very rare event.
A hundred thousand years ago the human population may have been less than 200,000. It seems that at about 70-100 thousand years ago it dropped dramatically in many parts of the world (climate, volcanoes, etc.?). A period when advanced artefacts have been found (including "art"). That might be what you were thinking of?
Yes, after all, what evidence might there be of our civilisation in 65 million years if we got a "dinosaur killer" tomorrow? Even the plastic particles will have degraded by then. Maybe there'll be evidence of the degraded chemicals left from plastics in the equivalent of a future KT boundary layer?
Since the 1940's all refined metals have been a tiny but measurable amount more radioactive than before nuclear weapons. Even in 65my that would be detectable in the layer from now, the metals might have oxidised away but the resulting metal compounds would retain the radioactivity. Also the long decayed ruins of nuclear waste repositories will result in radioactive hot-spots that cannot be explained naturally.
Volcanos and subduction would eradicate a lot but plenty should remain in regions that are not tectonically active and nuclear waste tends to be stored in tectonically stable regions.
Pretty much everything structural will been long buried and compressed out of recognition but there will be chemical shadows - minerals in places where they could not have formed naturally.
An equally interesting question is what's the maximum distance a hypothetical alien race of a roughly similar technological level could detect us from. Not just by radio but spectral analysis of the atmosphere and any other viable form of remote sensing.
"An equally interesting question is what's the maximum distance a hypothetical alien race of a roughly similar technological level could detect us from. Not just by radio but spectral analysis of the atmosphere and any other viable form of remote sensing."
Good point. We'll know when we find one :-
"Umm, come on, there will always be some folks to believe that."
True. Refusal to accept the obvious in favour of whatever they would prefer to believe is human nature, I'm afraid.
Should an alien visitor arrive and demand to be taken to our leader, there would be plenty of people claiming the poor bugger was a fake. Our first interstellar war will likely be caused by some conspiracy theorists accosting the alien ambassador and trying to rip his "mask" off - probably on live television.
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