All of this rampant plant growth created environments perfectly suitable for early monkey species to inhabit. We didn't evolve from monkeys, and what we evolved from *isn't* still around. Even if aliens were substantially similar psychologically, minor changes in biology could result in completely different societies. 1) Biologists are unaware of the existence of monkeys and apes. Although I suppose it is possible such progress could be made through some kind of evolutionary mechanism as opposed to individual intellect. I can imagine that within a thousand years, assuming we don't hit a cataclysmic event that wipes everything out, I could no longer understand anything that's going on anymore. https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-... Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later. Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less. They may like Rock & Roll, our food, our clothing, or even pogs. As our range increases, both in distance and in breadth, chances should get increasingly better. Interesting. alot of people beleive in big bang or evolution. I think the argument is that while ants are indeed interesting to us as a subject, not every single anthill gets our attention. The first issue is rather obvious… Even if we were descended from monkeys, why wouldn’t there still be monkeys? Back to your Newtonian statement, what if all of our current physics was thus? Or Titan? Even. It does point to a great filter that we are not seeing or understanding. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. There’s actually a really easy solution to this problem: they simply couldn’t get here. (we didn't btw), “Listen: I’m fascinated 23 hours a day. > just not at the pace and scale we are accustomed to. How did you know they were edible? Did you try talk with them? They are related to mussels and taste similar. Why, then, do you presume this will remain static forever? As best as I can tell, there are no ant species on any endangered list, so this is a hyperbolic point. It is amazing that Fermi, Einstein, et al were able to predict what they did without readily available modern computing hardware and search engines. From Wikipedia for "ant": 100? the aliens and ants analogy). and we didn't evolve from monkeys we had a common ancestor and evolve at the same time. Fairness, reciprocity, empathy, cooperation -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. If probes can easily and cheaply be made to cover the galaxy (and we know that this is possible even without major breakthroughs), aliens don’t need to be excited about us to visit the neighborhood. None. Overall I'm inclined to believe that cultural exchange with an intelligent extraterrestrial species would be harder and less productive than cultural exchange with parrots. You really think these limitations are so overwhelming that practically. An ant finds a peanut. They'd be some dead branch of the evolutionary tree that got pruned long ago, in all likelihood. Of all the potential Fermi outcomes, I find the “uninterested aliens” to be the silliest. Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. If you need to communicate any further away than that, you're using highly directional beamed communication between planets which won't be detectable unless the receiver just happens to also be along that beam line. Maybe someday we will be able to subjectively experience things not provided by our natural senses. "The Platyrrhines, or New World monkeys are all arboreal," palaeontologists John Flynn, from the American Museum of Natural History, told Popular Science. Say, a few years? "Strong" and "weak" is not the right way to characterize genes. It is perfectly possible that we'll discover additional extremely weak forces and effects, and they may completely contradict our interpretations of the physical theories we've discovered, but they are unlikely to prove that the facts (measurements themselves) we know now are wrong, at least in the regimes we've noticed them. Simple and obvious explanation in hand, no further inquiry or speculation about the existence of "advanced peanut roasting technology" is needed. Back to the alien analogy: if we believe that human-like life is as common across the universe as ants are on earth, then more-advanced aliens might well be philosophically interested in studying us, but not have yet bothered to reach us. Humans would still invent things even if painting gave everyone erotic pleasure. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Also note that the 0.16% is the region we could sweep with a theoretical telescope that we might be able to build in the near future, not the region we've actually surveyed thus far. Children of Time & Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. We went to visit the whales. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture. A viewpoint which only worked under certain circumstances. Taking the "ant" argument to it's logical conclusion and based on. We Swim in the Nude: A little later in the age of Aquarius, Elaine Morgan, a TV documentary writer, claimed that humans are so different from other primates because our ancestors evolved … We know animals have emotions, and they mostly map to our emotions. Before we dive into that question, we need to first discuss a time period known as the Eocene Epoch, which – based on the fossil record – researchers think stretched from 56 to 33.9 million years ago. A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be. I've got these. Asking it about Earth doesn't necessarily presume Earth is special, as the linked article suggests. The problem isn't with our intelligence, it's with our incentives. Of course, we have some massive problems to solve first, like biology, self-sustenance in deep space, cultural, financial, etc. 3) Your (home)schooling has failed you, and you do not understand evolution But it might be that the human brain represents the optimum size and capability possible for a living organism to sustain, based on requirements for energy consumption and evolutionary competitiveness. > But why would an intelligent species have to make any discoveries. > All other scenarios would require us to be extremely lucky. I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. > human beings may be individually smart (compared to some other species) yet the collective intelligence of humanity is rather poor (which translates to the unability to solve collective problems such as sustainable management of our finite natural resources (e.g. I don't disagree that these are probably out there. Earth’s surface temperature to drop a considerable amount. I've never heard of any theories that earth like conditions are new or unique, in fact half of all stars like ours are over 9 billion years old. [1] https://horseandrider.com/western-horse-life/fastest-a-quart... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse. There is nothing at all in the ant (hill) mind capable of understanding that a creature like a human might exist, never mind how to communicate with it. Because discoveries are useful. Perhaps, what looks like a sand particle to us might be a complex microorganism, in a complex interconnected self-regulating network, with no physical artifacts of "civilisation". As far as we know, we're the most advanced life form in the entire universe (for a given definition of "advanced"). The nearest 2000 lightyears make up 0.16% of the milky way galaxy. And even if that doesn't happen, we can only acquire raw materials and energy from our own planet, so we may basically just tap out all our resources before we learn to acquire it from somewhere else. It's not like we've stopped and said "ok we're good, no need to study other ant species.". There are many people who do not care at all about doing the kinds of things that lead to solving problems, and it is easy to imagine a species that is just them. But even if just a small fraction of civilizations engaged in interstellar expansion, they'd quickly subsume the galaxy on geological timescales. Also, if the ants talk, exchanging messages would make more sense for study. The sequel follows the development of octopuses. The planned Square Kilometer Array (SKA) would be able to pick up the same signal within 500 lightyears. However the size of the hole is small. "but humans like ants so why wouldn't the reverse be true? Might be closer to “Solaris”, where we just won’t get it regardless how hard we try. That does feel kind of lonely. Upvoted for a thoughtful response, but I want to be clear that I'm not saying the Fermi paradox is valid or even useful. If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? And finally, even if they have life, it still needs to develop in the right direction for it to be complex enough and interested in reaching out and colonizing the galaxy. But for that to have any meaning we should be in an universe where the speed of light is not the ultimate limit in any meaningful way, and so far we know, we don't. Emotions are pretty core to our understanding of the universe and ET may have emotions so radically different to ours that their view of the universe is not understandable to us. So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia. With less related animals likely having less related emotions to ours (like the emotions of a tuna fish compared to a chimpanzee). But their very point was that the simulation wouldn't have to compute every single individual particle, only the "interesting" ones. I dig the universe-is-a-simulation theory, given how we live in an era where our own computation power and simulation accuracy has only continued to increase for the past 70-odd years. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. This sounds like a very fun idea to do! Or don't need to visit "in person" to see what's going on (or visited in the past thousands of years and has seen "enough" for now). Great books. Yet this number seems incredibly low, for apparently (wikipedia) some ant colonies have 100s of millions of workers. Exterminators, ant eaters, and kids who stomp on ants for fun. While it's unknown what happened to these early, pioneering monkey populations, we can assume they eventually died out due to small population numbers. If you assume that the real hurdle is there being any aliens, such that many advanced alien species are almost as likely to exist as one, then indeed the majority may not want to study us 'ants'... but it only takes one.