I don't think this is an opinion. It can't be proven or disproven, currently, but it's still a matter of fact.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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I put it to you that we just haven't discovered life elsewhere. FWIW, this picture says why we likely haven't heard from life outside of our planet/solar system. Our radio signals have been travelling for nearly a century at this point, and this is as far as they've travelled.
I thinks there are 3 level of life discovery:
- Do life exist elsewhere ?
- Do life exist elsewhere and we detect it ?
- Do life exist elsewhere and we interact with it ?
Unfortunately, I'm now convinced universe is too huge and speed of light too slow to reach step 3. A best, we would have step 2. For step 1, if life exist outside of observable universe, it's like it doesn't exist at all as it's just physically impossible to detect it.
My current belief is life is so rare we are the only one in observable universe. Maybe there are few other outside of observable universe, which is much bigger, but as I said, it's like they don't exist at all.
This just scratches the surface, as someone highly knowledgeable in the topic, the ET hypothesis is phasing out and new concepts are brought in.
I agree with you, there are no ETs. If you dig at current information available you will also come to this conclusion.
Do you have sources or books recomandations ? I'm a big fan of hard Science fiction and scientific vulgarizations. The books from Hawkings "a brief history if time", "universe in a nutshell", etc... where mind blowing.
I don't read books about the paranormal because I think it's one of the ways to grift money
Another point I want to make is that these authors might not be good writers
Core information
Communion - Whitley Streiber, basically core mythology for things like abductions or experiences
UFOs and Nukes - Robert Hastings, essentially a record of events that hint a link between UAP activity and nuclear sites, nuclear technology, rockets
Any book by Richard M. Dolan, he's by far the most level headed and probably the only true historian in the field. He also has a YouTube channel where he goes through cases he believes have value, and typically his format is about linking memos or documents with events to prove that there's something to the case.
There's a lot to say about the authors but I think forming your own opinion is more valuable
Now for some books that I would only recommend to people with very high interest
An alien harvest - Howe L M, probably their best work and in wouldn't dig much deeper into their stuff from here. The author is particularly interested in cattle mutilation and similar events
Any Missing 411 book - David Paulides, take your pick depending on what you find most interesting
Skinwalkers at the Pentagon - Colm A Kelleher, best going into this one blind as there is a lot of high strangeness which might throw people off
Jacques Vallee gets a good rep in the ufo community but his books are really poorly written IMO. If you don't know who this is looking into him could be a good start for valuable information.
For a list authors to be cautious about:
Tom DeLonge, wrote some stuff, poorly written, allegedly it is fiction but supposed to reflect real non fiction events to bypass NDAs and whatever. No comment.
Chris Bledsoe, no comment, should be obvious what I'm thinking.
Ross Coulthart has good information but his books are tainted because he's a believer. I prefer when authors gather data and curate it to present it, but not when authors believe every shred of information presented to them.
Diana Palsulka, Bob Lazar, Jeremy Corbell
If a smaller, simpler, universe could handle life, we would be in that one.
That is a leap of logic that needs explanation. It sounds like you're misinterpreting Occam's razor. The razor is that an explanation is built with the smallest possible set of elements. It's a huge leap to extend that to us living in the smallest universe.
I agree, I do an easy extrapolation of Okam razor. What I try to say is that the argument that universe is big so there must be other life form doesn't make sense to me, and it may even be the opposite.
Assuming there are other life forms because universe is big implicitly assume probability of life apparition is higher than maybe 10e-20 per solar system. But even if our universe seem huge for our tiny brain, it is insignificant when dealing with combinatory probabilities. We can quickly reach 10e-100, 10e-1000 or even smaller probabilities just by adding some simple requirement. And as we have no ideas of the value of Drake equation, we really have no idea of probability of life apparition. Maybe this probability is so small that is it a miracle that we exist in a our "small" univese.
If life can live elsewhere, univers would be covered by life
How do you know the universe isn't teeming with life? Our capability to observe the universe around us is pitiful.
I mean we are still figuring out whether there might be life on Mars. Most other solar bodies have scarcely been investigated for life. Let alone other solar systems. The reality is we have no idea.
Not only that, we don't even have a good test for if something is or is not life. We know what water-based carbon life forms are on earth, but there may be other sets of conditions where self-replication is possible.
Hell, the concept of "life" itself is poorly defined.
Your third paragraph isn't logical. It's treating Occam's razor as if it were a physical law rather than a scheme for trying to guess the correct answer when you don't have enough information to determine it using a scientific approach. Even when used properly, Occam's razor doesn't guarantee anything about the accuracy of conclusions based on it.
But you're not just treating it as if it were a physical law but also extending it to the extreme and going from "when multiple explanations are equally plausible, prefer the one that depends on the fewest assumptions" to "any scenario can only arise from the simplest system that could cause that scenario to arise".
You exactly spot it. "any scenario can only arise from the simplest system that could cause that scenario to arise". Nature is lazy and don't like spending resources for nothing.
Again, it is my opinion, and I posted it here to challenge it.
If you have examples or argument against it, where scenarios did occured in over complex system, i'm interested 🙂.
Nature takes non-optimal "non-lazy" approaches all the time.
For example, the wiring of the eye in vertebrates is "backwards", with the optic nerve passing in front of the retina, blocking light and creating a blind spot. It takes more resources and more energy to do it backwards than it would to wire it up "correctly".
Complex natural systems often get stuck in local minima that prevent them from reaching true optional states. Take the fact that we haven't experienced vacuume collapse yet as another example.
I think your argument is also an argument against destruction of complexity back to simplicity.
It's also using circular logic. You're assuming the universe only has the complexity to give rise to one form of life and therefore the universe must be simple enough to have only given rise to one form of life.
Well it’s definitely unpopular.
Thanks 😇
Feel like I just got baited.
Just in the observable universe there are around 2 trillion galaxies. Our galaxy (pretty average as galaxies go) has more than 100 billion star systems, each of them with their corresponding planets.
Even if the average density of life is just 1 planet per galaxy (which frankly speaking, would be ridiculously low), you'd have a couple of trillion of planets with life. Intelligence of course would be scarcer, but I don't think it's that anomalous in the large scheme of things.
Your 2nd paragraph is potentially flawed, but maybe just incomplete.
We have areas that are exceptionally dry, exceptionally hot, or exceptionally acidic, among other things that have been found to be devoid of life. Even the geothermal vents example everyone points to needs a clarifier. Life lives near the vents, not on them. The temperature at the vent gets too hot for basic chemical process or even proteins to make sense.
I think watching the Pale Blue Dot video from Carl Sagan is also worth a watch just as a reminder of how big the universe is for the 'ejected into space' point too. The fastest we've ever traveled is around 25,000 mph briefly and life has been around for we think around 3.7 billion years. If we had been traveling as fast as we have ever traveled for the entirety of the time we think life has existed, we could make it around 140,000 light years (someone please check my math) compared to the observable universe being about 100 billion light years across. I think you at least get from one end of the milky way to the other with a bit to spare, just have to worry about anything that wasn't on that straight line and at least 200 billion galaxies to go (probably dramatically more).
Also, like, there's a reason the Weak Anthropic Principle was created along side the standard one and there's a reason we talk about the weak a lot more. The standard Anthropic Principle is really someone just saying that they don't want to talk about that anymore. It doesn't prove anything on it's own anymore than saying 'It is what it is'.
Universe is sparse, but panspermia is a valid theory, right ? I admit I just briefly read the wiki page about it, I didn't dig to check if it is a valid theory or not.
Regarding anthropic principle, I thought that weak one was about time and space in universe (earth around the sun and not another planet) and strong one was about the whole physic (our universe with its physical constants). Am I missing something ?
I'm clueless on what you're thinking about with your ideas on the principle. I can't think of a way to make either of those apply, but I could be missing something, super possible.
I don't entirely disagree with OPs base opinion, just how we get there. Just important to remember how early in the game we really are and how big the playing field is. Panspermia is interesting, but I personally think it mostly increases complexity instead of reducing it. I'm super skeptical of the idea of it being common.
If a smaller, simpler, universe could handle life, we would be in that one. Not our current one.
I don't really understand this one. Why couldn't there be other, "simpler" universes that also have life? Why must we (as we currently are) be the maximally complicated life that our universe can support?
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The closer the universe is to being infinite, the more likely ANYTHING that is possible, will happen. Like life, in whichever form.
It might not be technically infinite, but so incredibly gargantuanly vast, that to us finite Lil meatsacks, it basically is.
Even if the chance for developing life might be infinitesimal, there are a real lots of dice-rolls in that universe, so why should it be only us...
Be carefull. An infinite sum of values doesn't always give an infinite value 😉 And even if universe huge, it is far from being infinite.
When dealing with probabilities and combinatory, you can reach crazy values. As example, there are more 128bits RSA keys than there are atoms in the whole universe.
And if something has a probability of for ex. 10e-80 to happen, you'll need a shitload numbers of universe to makes it happen.
I'm skeptical of any claims about the total number of atoms in the universe. We don't know how far it goes. When the Webb telescope was first deployed, some astronomers expected to see the limits of how far we can see because the time lag for the distance would have approached the big bang. Instead they just saw more galaxies, albeit younger ones.
And even if we had seen into when the universe was opaque, that wouldn't imply anything about that being its limit.
Not to mention our current best models depend on these vague ideas of dark matter and dark energy because otherwise observations of the universe don't fit what our current best models think it should behave like.
I don't think we have the knowledge to really say all that much about whether the universe is infinite or how much of anything is in it. Or if it's alone and what its relationship is with other universes, if any.
Sure, all of this should be taken with "current state of science". But if we start saying "we don't know anything, we may be wrong", then we just cannot discuss about anything.
Estimation of size of universe vary depending on the models. I've read it's ~10^80 atomes. Let's makes it 10 times bigger. It would gives 10^81, what a big deal. One billion time bigger, 10^89. You see what I mean ?
But as I know there are currently no scientific model that suppose an infinite universe.
Sometimes, "we don't know anything" is the most honest discussion that can be held.
And even if the number of worlds would be just 1000, the chance for another kind of life evolving out of the same "thin air" as we did, given millions of years of time, is still pretty high I'd argue. And the number is surely higher than 1000 :-)
Yes, it's probably not infinite, as far as we "know" (or deducted). But it's very close to that given how our monkey-brains struggle with incredible big numbers. Many people already struggle to grasp what a billion, let alone a trillion moneyz is. We're talking of an enourmous number of worlds, with an even more enourmous number of possibilities to form life over the count of millions of years.
Also it would be really really sad, if THIS <points to our species> is the best this universe could come up with. Doesn't mean I wouldn't accept the fact if evidence pointed towards it.
Or just billions of years of chances....
Actually, life won't be possible anymore in some billions of years. Not enough stars anymore, too much spaces between galaxies. Too Much darkness 😢
We are in the very brief bright moment of the universe.
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Life as we know it, life in different forms may thrive.
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They have already had billions of years. They may have already been started just very far away.
Not enough stars anymore, too much spaces between galaxies. Too Much darkness
Life on earth isn't dependent on any other star, none of what you mentioned is relevant to life arising on earth.
Life did depend on other stars. At the very beginning, there were only hydrogen in space. Then 1st generation of stars built helium by fusion then explode, creating second generation of stars that create heavier elements and so one.
Life really couldn't appears in a single star universe, because there were just not enough "atomes factories".
OK, now the matter is here, other stars might not be required anymore. But stars have a very limited life time. Sun will explode in ~5 billions years, so do other stars. Other stars will born, but this is not unlimited. Once every atoms will be fusion into heavy elements, there just won't be new stars anymore and univers will enter in its dark era. This should happen in ~100 billions years. Then there will just be blackhole during 10e100 years, and then very slow decay during something like 10e(10e(10e10)) years. At least, it is one of the currently admitted theories.
Yes, my point is as long as there's new stars that's all you need, it doesn't matter if they're rare or far apart, unlike what you stated.
we arent even able to see planet surfaces in our closest neighbor solar systems. Everything outside of sol is just blurry specks if not just radio waves on a telescope
If you’re assuming that life outside Earth would look the same then I’d lean much more heavily into saying you’re right. But I think your premise is completely off: why would it look the same as it does here?
And I also think you’re ignoring just how vast and empty a lot of space is. Everything is spread completely apart. The universe really could be full of life already but it’s simply too far away from us for us to see it.
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In order to understand the Fermi paradox you need to know the bitteroldcoot corollary: Why the fuck would anyone want to talk to humanity. They are brutal, murderous pieces of shit. If anyone ever landed on earth they would be dissected alive and their technology stolen.
If anyone ever landed on earth they would be dissected alive and their technology stolen.
If anyone had the technology to travel the vast distances between potentially inhabitable locations in space, they would appear godlike to us. It would be like ants going to war against a herd of elephants, who happen to also be wizards.
I'm referring to only one of the fermi's paradox aspect. That is, if an intelligent life form emerge, it would need only a few hundred thousand years for her to colonize its galaxy. I think this could even be the case with non-intelligent life form as well, using panspermia.
But yes, Fermi paradox has several other potential explanation (dark forest, regular mass extinction, economic limitation, etc...)
Not every planet can support life - there's a pretty specific set of circumstances that have to occur (to support life that we're aware of). There are other planets in the universe that, as far as we're aware, meet these requirements, but they're a very long ways away. Multiple lightyears. Any bacteria ejected would in any conceivable case die long before reaching one.
What makes you think that out of all of the potentially life supporting planets in the universe, ours was the only one to develop life?
Technically, I believe Enceladus and Europa are also excellent candidates for extraterrestrial life similar to earth life.
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Age of Disclosure - sorry
Is it a serious documentary or some history channel Bullshits ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Disclosure_
It is a serious documentary with some of the most serious and irrefutable voices in the “UAP” community of all time. It was released in 2025 and anyone who has any interest in the existence of non-human intelligence will find it fascinating. I would think that anyone commenting on this thread would find it mind blowing. correct me if I’m wrong
Thanks, I'll have a look then.
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