You were played by the writers. There is no way Lima could have ruled out the existence of ET life in the universe just by surveying whatever they were surveying from where they were surveying. This whole thing was so unscientific it hurt the brain.

Did you also like how they had to fly him to Mars just to send a voice message? This "no ETs" BS was on a similar intellectual level.

@globalistas said:

Did you also like how they had to fly him to Mars just to send a voice message? This "no ETs" BS was on a similar intellectual level.

I, and looks like many others, wondered about this too. I can only think that they needed him there "live" in case the dad responded immediately. If it was a recording, there couldn't be a two way conversation.

Although thinking more, unless I missed something, why was the message, and even Brad Pitt's character, even needed? It was clearly revealed later on that SPACECOM knew his dad went rogue and that they were going to kill him/Lima. The Cepheus had nuclear explosives so that objective was known from the outset.

And in connection to that, why would the crew of Cepheus jeopardise this by attending to a mayday call?

While I enjoyed this, the plot was full of holes.

Frankly people always assume that if there is intelligence they have to more advance. When the opposite can easily be true. A planet can have intelligent life and not be able to communicate over far distances. Which has been the case for humans for 99.9% of human existence. It also helps that humans have a free set of appendages that we can use to build and create with. Give a Dolphin a Human Brain. I doubt it could build a house. There might be a whole planet full of Super Intelligent Dolphin that cant build sh!t. I don't doubt life existed other places. But Traveling and Communicating from distance that span light-years. Is another thing.

@acontributor said:

Light years assumes that extra terrestrial life can't be found in our own solar system. Very good points otherwise. I think we should be looking for extra terrestrial life in our own solar system before looking elsewhere.

Frankly even if they could just find more then just bacteria. That would be good enough for me.

Yikes! (Loosens collar, looks around nervously) . . .

Tough crowd here! Remind me never to ask any of you guys to write an entertaining Sci-Fi yarn . . . you'd all get so hung up on details it'd probably end up being hopelessly arcane:)

Anyhow . . . I didn't find the conclusion that there was no intelligent life beyond Earth based on the surveying equipment and the mathematical research done by Jones' character to be all that unbelievable; while I'm guessing that most physicists and astronomers probably believe there's other advanced life out there, there are scientists who, through mathematical research, admit of the possibility that we humans may be alone in the universe; even Stephen Hawking admitted that we humans may have come into being as "intelligent" life forms by pure subatomic chance, and that evolving "intelligence" might not even be the best path for a species purely interested in survival (compared to say, maybe, a simple bacteria that can survive a myriad of environmental extremes in a variety of settings).

As I've gotten older, I've come more to thinking perhaps along the lines of Nygma-0999-- we'd have more success looking for simple (non-intelligent) life forms here within our own solar system; some scientists still think we may find simple extraterrestrial life forms as close by as Mars. Given the limitations of physics (no warp drive, for example)-- in addition to financial constraints --I've become more convinced that humankind will not undertake manned spaceflight beyond our own solar system, though unmanned probes are a possibility (indeed, one of the Voyager space probes left our solar system some years ago, and if I remember correctly, it was still transmitting messages out into the cosmos).

Getting back to this thread's original question, The Black Hole (1979) and Dune (1984) both implied that humanity was the only intelligent life (no advanced extraterrestrial life), although the novelization of TBH and the Dune books were much more clear about this; also, the movie Interstellar (2014)-- although a habitable planet was eventually found, it demonstrated how rare these were (as opposed to what we see in the Star Trek movies and TV programs), and they still did not find advanced life.

Anyway, there's my two cents, or three:)

I would say that alien life is the foundation of science fiction, Heroic Spacemen and Bug-eyed monsters and all. I do recall a very short story about a ship that has gone so far into the universe that there no stars left to see.

Have to be picky about TBH and Dune. There is no humanity in Dune. It takes place in a different solar system entirely, on the planet Arrakis, there is also the planet Ix. Haven't seen The Black Hole in a long while but wasn't it just centered in the black hole. There were some strange sights in there. And what was in the other side wasn't revealed. Kind of a Disney live action take on a 2001 type story.

@northcoast said:

Yikes! (Loosens collar, looks around nervously) . . .

Tough crowd here! Remind me never to ask any of you guys to write an entertaining Sci-Fi yarn . . . you'd all get so hung up on details it'd probably end up being hopelessly arcane:)

Anyhow . . . I didn't find the conclusion that there was no intelligent life beyond Earth based on the surveying equipment and the mathematical research done by Jones' character to be all that unbelievable;

The scientifically correct thing for them to say would have been "our findings in this specific investigation did not confirm alien life". To say "we have completely ruled out the entire possibility of alien life based on the findings of this experiment" is something truly preposterous. Ask any scientist about how the scientific method works.

Therefore, basing any characters or their motivations on this ridiculous plot point is a very low-effort job by the writers.

@znexyish Everyone in Dune is human - it's based far into the future (thousands of years IIRC) when humanity has traveled beyond our own solar system. As for Ad Astra tbh I'm not sure what the main point was supposed to be. I realize it was partially about being alone - the Brad Pitt character ruminated a lot on the subject. I noticed a few of the characters seemed to be religious, including the Tommy Lee Jones character, which makes me wonder if his search for ET life was really a search for God and he couldn't accept it when he couldn't find Him. Brad Pitt's line "We're all we've got" lends to the idea of the movie being about being alone and could also be a commentary on the existence of God since there is also the line "Science has proven it [i.e. God] does not exist."

Short version: The Drake equation is nonsense.

The position that there is no known extra terrestrial life is the default rational position. Nothing can be said to exist until it is found. Some people might be uncomfortable with that, even to the point of invoking probability, but probability is only as good as the numbers you already have. Even if you found billions of worlds you are only extrapolating from the data from one of those worlds: ours.

Imagine a man, for the first time in his life, buying a lotto ticket and winning. If he has no knowledge of how many tickets there are out there or how many numbers are drawn, it must seem that the chances of winning are pretty good.

As regard to the chances of intelligent life, it is well to remember that only one of the TRILLION estimated species on Earth today can even ask such question. And life on Earth today is a mere 1% or so that has ever existed before, some 98%+ having gone extinct. It seems self evident that not one of them was able to ask these questions. So even on a planet that teems with life, ours, the chances of intelligent life is lower than 1 in 100 trillion. And it took the Earth's biosphere more than 3 billion years to produce it.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=138446