Why Aren't We Hearing From Space Aliens?

Time Assumptions Are Probably Silly

Sci-fi superthinker of the '80s Robert Forward invented a civilization that evolved at super speed.
In Dragon's Egg, Forward put his aliens on a neutron star. Could happen! I mean after Donald Trump became president, it became clear absolutely anything can happen.

And several Big Thinkers have conceived that life could evolve in any situation you can imagine. Even on humble little Earth, we've got life around super hot springs seven miles down in the Marianas Trench.
     A neutron star is just a bit more exotic, with gravity squashing its surface at 67 billion times more pull that gravity here. Heavy. Time runs faster under those conditions ("Time dilation;" Einstein), and the tiny life forms experience a "day" on Dragon's Egg in 0.2 of our seconds (neutron stars spin really fast; some spin up to way faster than even that), and a typical lifetime is about 40 minutes and seems as long to them as a lifetime seems to us. Those aliens could read a book in, say, 0.4 seconds. Could happen. 
    You get the picture. Time scales for aliens might be running on totally different clocks from ours. To Forward's neutron star people, we are moving so slowly as to look like statues.  Most of us assume we (humans, aliens, everybody) are all  using the same clock. Short sighted at best, I'd say.

Next time you get all frustrated that the SETI folks aren't hearing from any aliens, just consider that they may be sending us whole encyclopedias of information, but it is going so fast we would hear only "blip," and assume it was static. Big, slow and dumb would be the judgement of the fast aliens about humans.

Of course we may be living at superspeed compared to other aliens, etc., etc., etcetera. Who knew this SETI stuff was so complicated?

P.S. If you like sci-fi, you might check out the discussion group on Disqus.com (look for "Sci-fi")

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