Are we alone?

Are we alone in the Universe? If we are, that would be a lot of coincidence, unless one believes in God who created us specifically and the rest of Universe is here... just because. If we are not alone, how come we haven't heard from anyone yet? Maybe because there is no one out there?

One certain thing (certain == observable) is that complexity generally increases. As with our own evolution, it's a chain of coincidences and ups and downs, but the result is... us. One big coincidence? Divine intervention? Inevitability? Any system where self-replication is involved (think of bureaucracies, complex molecules and living forms) gets more complex over time. It's like natural law. It seems highly improbable that the chain of events that took place on Earth would not be repeated over and over throughout Universe - we know that planets are more common than we once thought, and there are many with conditions (light, temperature) allowing for complexity to arise and perpetuate until...

...life happens, self-replication reaches the stage where...

...self-reflection is possible. And intelligence happens. Again, it is debatable whether intelligence (or rather consciousness) is a coincidence and Mother Nature's "accident at work", but it might be that it is, yet again, inevitable.

So to continue with the speculation, where is everyone? There must have been, must be many civilizations out there, and yet.. not contact. Or maybe contacts already happened, and all the UFO spotters are actually right? But that's not evidence, and I understand "contact" as the proper "take us to your leader" big-ass spaceship landing on White House (or Kremlin, why not Kremlin? If the aliens are hostile, Mr Putin is much more likely to deal with them properly) - so why it has not happened yet? Or at least - why no radio signals? No signs of life anywhere we can see?

One thing is that (I'm talking about general population) we tend to forget that a) distances in Universe are vast and signal traveling over radio waves takes its time, then it would have to be a powerful signal indeed to reach us from afar, and we've been only listening for what, half a century? That would be a coincidence indeed, someone out there sending signals precisely at the moment (50 years is a blink of an eye comparing to Universe's scales of time and space), strong enough for us to receive, and using medium we can receive, like the radio waves. It's not only time and resources, but also will to communicate...

The last variable in The Drake Equation is "lifetime of such a civilization wherein it communicates its signals into space". Now, it says nothing about willingness to do it, but it is interesting to consider that the speculative number here is, according to that wiki page, just few centuries - that it is definitely not certain that once a civilisation gets advanced enough to start signaling its existence it will continue to do so - indeed, civilisation have limited lifespan and it makes our assumption of possibility of contact even more arrogant.

And human arrogance is the interesting factor here. We debate existence of other intelligent life forms out there and why no contact happened, and yet... We've been able to receive communication for only few decades. We have no idea what can happen in the nearest future to us. Our speculations are based on history of just one species we know, our own. How a civilisation might start to be able to communicate is known (more or less), but how about the other end? How and why a civilisation stops to send signals? There might be three answers, one being autodestruction (definitely possible, as we can see on our own example), second being the the will to communicate ceases (they decided to not waste energy), and the third option is the most interesting.

We know that technological progress is of exponential nature. Progress we made in the last century is so much greater than the in the last thousand of years (although the century would not have happened if it wasn't for that thousand of years obviously). What will happen in the next decade? Two decades?

Maybe we discover an ansible. Connect to galactic networks and understand that radio waves.. well, devices for radio communication exists only in museums across Universe and no one is using them anymore.

Maybe we discover that what we define communication as is just our invention and other... ways of co-knowing stuff is better? At this point human language is not strong enough to convey meaning :)

Maybe we discover that what we define defining as is just our invention?

Maybe one day our past will become an item in Intergalactic Museum of Origins of Intelligent Life (or Comedy Museum).

And maybe we need to progress more, learn FTL and be the species which descends in flying saucers on distant planets, bringing message of peace and unity across Universe.

In any case... we don't know yet what is out there, but we can suspect it will be a total surprise when we find out - and while debating it now is fun, there is no need to get attached to any particular point of view.