[colordrops]

Another argument goes that they transcending to technology and form beyond what we can comprehend, covered their tracks, and left us be because we aren't interesting or to avoid interfering in our development. Perhaps our perception through the 5 senses and an understanding of reality as a physical universe of spacetime is just a short phase between being an animal and being a multidimension being.

[fsloth]

That’s basically a ”rapture” hypothesis. ”We can’t see them because of ancient technobabble sciencemagic lifted them to another realm”.

In otherwords this is a supernatural, not natural hypothesis.

In other words, that’s more of a religious rather than scientific hypothesis.

It’s cool to have inspiration from where-ever, the whole point of religion and art is that they don’t need to be scientific.

But one really shouldn’t confuse non-scientific inspiration with actual science. Confusing the two leads to arguments like earth is 6000 years old and god just faked all the fossil evidence etc.

[bmitc]

> In other words, that’s more of a religious rather than scientific hypothesis.

I get what you're getting at, but I don't think it's so clear cut. Religion is more about organizational beliefs than just beliefs. Many parts of science are pretty far fetched in terms of us only knowing a bit with a very tightly constrained perspective (humans sitting on Earth with limited technology in the Solar System in the Milky Way) but making leaping conjectures. So in fact, science and religion have some shared analogues. (C.f. Paul Feyerabend.)

Certainly, the hypothesis you replied to is incredibly far fetched. But I don't think it's religious. It's more fantasy.

[tiberious726]

It's not falsifiable, therefore not scientific

[bmitc]

To be clear, I didn't say it was scientific.

[K0balt]

TBF we are assuming that we universally know what toolness looks like. There easily could be other forms of or paths to technology that we are completely ignorant of, even to the point of being ignorant of our ignorance.

[Izkata]

A much less out-there version was in Star Trek, they built spaceships and left, bringing most/all of their civilization with them. That version was just treated as lost history, with whatever may have been left behind simply not having been found yet or having decayed over such a long time period.

[Ekaros]

Big issue with this is would any species care to do that? To clean up planet used for years, decades or centuries by decent population would be massive undertaking. Probably magnitudes bigger than getting there in first place...

[colordrops]

Downvoters; I'm not arguing for this, just mentioning one of the arguments I've heard. I was going to be explicit about this and it looks like I should have been.

[mock-possum]

Yeah that’s more of a sci-fi plot than an argument.

[DrSiemer]

Isn't it one of the more likely answers to the Fermi paradox? "Transcending" could also be "everyone got really into VR and stopped caring about actual reproduction".