The universe is vast. The assumption that any species could travel to another is a flawed one.

The assumption that other life has both the capacity and desire to explore the universe is flawed. Think of all the variety of life that has ever existed on Earth. How many of those species have ever attempted to travel to space?

Next imagine a species that does want to explore the universe to find other life. Would it make more sense for them to focus their efforts looking to the outer rim of the galaxy with the lowest number of celestrial bodies, where we are, or more towards the center where there is a statistically higher chance of finding life?

If there is an alien species with the capability and desire to explore the universe, and they search the less dense outer rim of the galaxy, and they happen to stumble upon our tiny spec of dust in the sandstorm, what if they don’t communicate in a way perceivable by us (and vice versa)? They may have flown right without realizing we were here and we could have looked right past them at the same time.

It’s also possible that ancient alien theorists are right. We have been visited. They kicked it with ancient humans for a while before heading back home to tell their friends about us and arrange future visits. The round trip could easily take 10s of thousands or even millions of years.

Or:

1. We’re to primitive to interact with due to missing some critical technology. Like how primitive tribes today would have no idea what radio communication and electricity are, there might be messages flying all around us from alien civs, but we can’t detect them, and they aren’t looking for the radio radiation we put out.

2. We already know of several critical events that needed to happen for life like us to be here: (short list) the rise of oxygen forcing life to adapt to using it as fuel; a slow deforestation giving time for our ancestors to descend from trees and adapt to living only on the ground, and whatever happened that led to the rise of highly intelligent neanderthalis, denisovand and sapiens apes after a million years of erectus without much change. We know something serious happened, just not what.

There is also filters in front of us. Getting over our addiction to petrochemicals looks to be one, it looks increasingly like internet overreliance might be another. Death of the host star or galactic mergers are things too.

3. Space is too big to visit in person. Civs exist and persist, but everything is too far apart, FTL either remains fantasy or is so prodigiously expensive it is not worth it on us.

4. Tied to 2 and 3, civs exist, but are too far apart and don’t last long enough to detect one another. E.g. to get our first radio signals across just our galaxy would be tens of thousands of years. There are billions of galaxies. The earth will be swallowed and die by the sun when the first waves get roughly a third of the way to a far as we can see.

It boils down to one thing let’s say they find us or we find them. They set out on a trip to us traveling at near C speed. By the time they reach us we may not be around anymore as thousands of years have passed. The universe is so vast not only do catch them in space but also in time. The lack of contact is just a series of near misses.

I sometimes think about the possibility that other sentient life exists in the universe, but we are the most technologically advanced.

We tend to fantasize the other way around and that aliens would be more advanced than us, but what if we were the oldest ones and the only species having any kind of space flight at all?

Our universe is not only vast it is expanding in all directions. The universe almost certainly has intelligent life at various time and places. That any develop sufficiently to communicate by radio broadcasts of sufficient power within the relatively tiny area of our ~100 years or so of our being able to listen considering the time it takes for signals to reach us mean that our sampling window is just too small.

Imagine a sphere centered around earth spreading out in all directions. The outer edge represents the space where their radio could have reached us by now since we became capable of listening and even bothered carefully listening. Meaningful systematic SETI is like 1970’s and forward. So ~50 light years or so. Anything further hasn’t reached us yet. Anything closer may have already passed us. Maybe they stopped. Maybe they moved onto something past radio, or maybe they are dead.

For example, humanity has had aproximately 125 years or so of radio where someone could detect us. Not a long time. We are already breeching 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, environmental limits that once breeched work like a timebomb that risk our civilization’s collapse and possible extinction. We could nuke ourselves out of existence at any minute for the last 75 years. How long will we be broadcasting for? That expanding sphere of space where our radio has reached will hollow out if/when we stop broadcasting. So alien civilizations that want to listen to us can only be in that very thin slice of space between when we started and when we stop broadcasting. Compared to the universe, it’s nothing. Our galaxy, the milky way is 84000ly in diameter to give you some perspective.

For us to find alien life, our two civilizations both have to fall within our imagenary expanding hollow sphere of radio listening and their hollow expanding sphere of broadcasting. We’ve barely scraped the smallest corners of our own section of the unfashionable part of the spur on a minor spiral arm of our galaxy. 50ly/84000ly= 0.059% of our galaxy for anyone currently broadcasting. Our listening sphere goes back in time and out in distance a lot further, but has similar limitations. If anyone in our nearest neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, was broadcasting, they would have had to do it ~2.5 million years ago for us to hear it now. If they did it ~2.500050 million years ago, we missed it because we weren’t listening.

Here is a map of stars withing 50ly of us.

Edited for clarity and something aproximating correctness. It still sucks, but I’m too hungover.

What?

You’re literally ruling out the most likely scenario:

Life is spread out all over, but even if they knew we were here, they’d never get to us.

Like, there could be a planet on the exact same level as us, thinking the same thing about aliens. But if they’re 1,000 light years away, all the know about Earth is it has water. Something they might not even consider relative in the search for life if they don’t need water.

And even if they wanted to send us a signal and could figure out where to send it, best case scenario we get it in a thousand years and they have to wait at least two for a response they’d have no idea if we’d be capable of sending back.

Even if every planet tried to contact the first 10 planets with life they find, eventually the novelty would wear off and they wouldn’t keep wasting all the resources just to add another tally 2k years from now to the list of planets with life.

Everyone gets hung up on aliens wanting to interact with us, because we want aliens.

If an alien civilization is advanced to know about us, they don’t give a fuck about us. And they wouldn’t, except if they’re planning on such long timelines that their procedure for finding life is to just steer a couple giant asteroids at us.

A civilization capable of noticing us, just wouldn’t have anything to gain from interacting with us.

I mean the obvious thing is, we haven’t come close to finding a loophole to the speed of light speed limit. in the massively tiny portion of the universe we can see, there’s lots of “seems to have water, could possibly support life” planets, but well over 80 light years away (and those are the “close” ones).

Then if we do assume some life forms were to have faster than light travel, we are probably not a “no contact”, but rather “low priority”. To a species that far ahead of us technologically. They’d have access to billions of planets, at which point if life is relatively common, we’d be very un-special.

If it turns out to be the former, I don’t blame them.

Time and Space is so vast that alien civilizations may have already come and gone in that time span.

Humans have only been around for a blink of a eye in the timeline of the universe. It could be some alien civilizations are only starting to evolve from bacteria at this very moment, or another few have already gone extinct thousands of years ago.

Religious and mystical literature is full of reports of encounters with aliens.

People also report seeing aliens while dreaming, meditating and under the influence of hallucinogens.

So there are aliens, it just maybe isn’t in the direction we assume.

I am in the camp where I think its more likely that traveling faster than light is less likely than there being a way to travel faster than it. Im not even sure if space really is expanding faster or if we figure out at some point it was something where it seemed like it was but it wasn’t. That means travel would pretty much have to be something like colony ships or seed ships or something with non crewed leading the way. Its taken 5 billion years for the eath to get us here but the galaxy is only like twice that since it settle down (these are realllly rough). there is this thing about if a species went balls out on colonization it could be done in like 100k years but a more reasonable one where they take a few hundred years to build up in each solar system before moving out more is like 50 million but I personally would push it out further to 1billion. heck many would fail or break away or whatever. communication would still be speed of light and likely slower with relays and such. Im going to say a billion. Then we are in an oddly in pretty empty part of both the galaxy and the universe so who knows. Maybe there is some thing happening in most of the universe and we are like on this wierd island. Like those tribes that last I knew were still around that we try to not let the modern world interfere with.