this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
120 points (95.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
846 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If the universe is infinite, and there's no reason not to believe that this very well may be the case, then it's almost certain that there is other intelligent life out there. However, just as the vastness of an infinite universe guarantees other intelligent life, it also guarantees that we'll never meet. We may find evidence of them, or they may find evidence of us, but the odds of intelligent life concurrently existing in near enough proximity for our independent geneses, evolution, and advancement to interstellar travel before either people managed to die out is effectively zero. And mere radio communication between interstellar civilizations would literally take generations for a basic conversation at best. Humans may not even last another thousand or even hundred years. Can you imagine history textbooks in 3000 talking about current times the way that we talk about the Norman conquest of England or the first crusade? It's weird to imagine where they'll be to look down upon our ways of life now.