I’ve noticed recently several postings on social media questioning why haven’t we heard from intelligent beings from outer space. The question has so often been asked, if we are capable of listening to signals from outer space, and observing all the stars and planets and galaxies and all the other stuff that exists out there, why haven’t we heard from or seen other intelligent species which must be there? Considering the number of planets that must exist in our own galaxy, somewhere in the trillions, there should be other species at least as astronomically sophisticated as us, if not more so, and in some cases, even much more so. So where are they? Why haven’t we heard from them or seen them?
Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain (or at least attempt to explain) this discrepancy. Among them are: they’ve been here and are gone (leaving their DNA behind which grew up to be us); they are deliberately avoiding us; they really are here but we don’t know that; they’ve picked up and deciphered our electromagnetic transmissions (radio or TV or whatnot) and don’t want to have anything to do with any civilization that would broadcast Real Housewives of [fill in city]; we are too puny and unsophisticated for them to bother with us; they’re scared of us and our nuclear weapons and our almost hair-trigger tendency to use them; there aren’t any other civilizations out there (we’re the only one in the galaxy); or—my favorite—that the distances among stars are too great for them to come here. All valid explanations, yes, but workable only for us, still bound to our own planet on which we developed and still live. But still, aliens from other worlds would necessarily be much different from us, and we don’t know anything about what they think about us.
What I’m proposing is another explanation which seems to be left out, that aliens from other planets may be so vastly different from us that our explanations may not apply. We’re using our own logic in trying to figure out why they haven’t contacted us. We know nothing about any other living life forms. Our knowledge is so elementary we can’t even make a simple judgement about what they are like, what their chemical makeup is, what they are thinking, how far advanced they are in spaceflight, and so forth. It’s not for us to even try to guess what their logic systems are and how they use them. Our concepts about extraterrestrial life forms may be so grossly incomplete or just so blatantly wrong that trying to guess what kind of logic they use may be completely and outrageously incorrect. They may be avoiding us for reasons that are totally foreign to our logic.
Personally, I always go back to the explanation that the distances within the galaxy are so great that travel among the stars and their planets is just impossible. Any thoughts?