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Extraterrestrials Probably Haven't Found Us - Yet
kasparn writes "The Guardian today has a story about the Danish astrophysicist Rasmus Bjoerk, who recently conducted simulations on how long it will take to colonize the Milky Way. The basic idea is to send out probes in different directions (including various heights above the galactic plane). He estimates that it will take some 10 billion years to explore 4 % of the Milky Way. Since the age of the Universe is of the same order, his conclusion is that aliens can't have had time required to find us yet."
Well obviously you would use a TARDIS, which makes it more like 100%.
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We will be in a lot of trouble if the Cylons find us first.
I haven't RTFA (at work) but I'm guessing this is assuming that they haven't developed signals/travel faster than the speed of light.
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Why 1/10th c? Why not 99% of c? Why not faster than c? Granted faster than light travel is nothing more than theory and dreams at this point, but this article makes the assumption that other civilizations have not progressed in the field of physics any faster nor further than we ourselves have, to date.
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Sheesh, talk about "proof by lack of imagination." This is supposed to answer the Fermi Paradox?
You can't explore a galaxy with a handful of probes. 72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
Not impressed by this guy's argument.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Come on. 4% is a hell of a lot better than your odds of winning the lottery and that happens *everyday*.
Plus he's not taking into account multiple alien races. So that's like double 4% which is almost 8%. Do that a few hundred times and you get 108%. This guy clearly doesn't understand math.
Humans will have killed themselves off with war before they have the chance to find us!
This figure of taking billions of years to explore the galaxy is utterly wrong. Actually, it only takes a few dozen million years to colonize the entire damn galaxy, which is a lot more effort than merely exploring it.
This figure is based on some very reasonable assumptions. Colony ships travel at much below the speed of light. Each colony gets a thousand years of development time from first colonization before it starts sending out its own colony ships. As you can see, even though it seems quite "slow", thanks to the magic of exponential growth, the entire galaxy is colonized in short order.
We won't merely be discovered if aliens exist - we'll be colonized. That's the most likely scenario for running into aliens. If they never spread beyond their home planet, they'll just be one star out of trillions - but if they do start colonizing, we'd find them everywhere.
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So it would take 10 billion years to visit 4% of the Milky Way. In theory, if there are any aliens within the nearest 4% to us, they may have had time to visit us. Realistically, let's say the nearest 2%, to allow time for intelligent life to evolve and develop space travel. 2% of the galaxy is still a pretty big space, though you'd think we'd have seen some evidence of an alien civilization that (relatively) nearby.
To paraphrase: But Sir! If we only send 8 probes it'll take billions of years to search a mere 4% of the Milky Way galaxy!
That's why you have to make the probes self replicating.. utilizing in-situ resources to make more probes at each star they visit, the growth becomes exponential and it only takes a few thousand years to search the entire galaxy. And seeing as we're visiting all these stars anyway, how about looking for planets that don't have life on them, but have nice suitable conditions for starting life on them. Cover a virgin planet with a wide variety of Earth lifeforms and fly on.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Who says they don't already have that transport? How would we know if they did or they didn't? Not that I know one way or another if there's any other life out there... but if it's possible there is not life elsewhere, isn't it also possible that there is life and that life that might exist possibly created some "exotic form of transport" already?
Why would a supercivilisation build only 8 probes? They could have technology to detect Earth sized planets in the habitable zone. And they could send out hundreds of thousands probes to such planets. The problem is, if they don't have warp speed, these probes would not reach the planets until either the destination is already destroyed, or the sending civilisation itself is destroyed.
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Well, yes.
They are called the French and they across the pond.
=)
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I need to introduce this guy to my next-door neighbor...
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Exactly, who say Aliens - if they exist - hasn't come up with some vastly superior way of travel (maybe instant teleportation, etc). And even if they do know about our presence, why would they care? There are most likely millions of other planets that are available, why bother fighting over one that has inferior beings on it, that will most likely destroy themselves within the next few centuries. We most likely have nothing of value to them, so what would be the purpose of them "contacting us"
...his conclusion is that aliens can't have had time required to find us yet."
Under what time frame? If an alien race has had advanced technology for 100,000,000 Trillion years, then they'd have plenty of time (and would probably have technology more advanced then sending out physical "probes"). It doesn't see likely from what we know, but I don't think we actually know that much.
Why is it that scientists think that only what we can achieve is possible? It's like us looking for aliens using our technology (SETI). Not that it's impossible, but I'd think other intelligent being could come up with other forms of communication than our own; even if it wasn't more "advanced".
Traveling at the speed of light, it would take a quarter million years to reach Andromeda. What's more is that if I went into statis now, the compound interest on my savings would pay for the journey.
We can always give their computer systems a virus.
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They models used to reach the conclusion mentioned in the summary were calculated using a maximum speed of 10% the speed of light. Suppose that FTL travel had been developed by these advanced extraterrestrials - what then? I know it seems now like science fiction or fantasy, but you know the old adage about sufficiently advanced technology...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
What about probes that land and replicate on foreign terrestrial bodies? 1 probe lands and makes 10 or a hundred of itself. Send out 10 of these type of probes, and exponential growth will do your work for you.
Whatever his assumptions are that leads him to 4%... it seems that he is considering only the probability that any ONE alien civilization is looking. But in all likelihood there are many, if not millions of alien civilizations out there than may be search, so the probability that any ONE of those million will find us seems quite a bit higher than 4%.
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They want all of our "base"?
1. Probes sent by extraterrestials cannot travel faster than our probes.
2. The ET search is not targeted.
3. The ETs are not much closer to Earth and found us by luck, early in their search.
At any rate, while the math is interesting, it just shows that we're not likely, as in snowball's-chance-in-hell likely, to have been found already. From a logical point of view, though, one cannot say that we haven't been found yet.
As far as we know for certain, the Vogon construction fleet could be circling our system as we type these responses... though the chance of that being the truth is small enough that we could very well see an Improbability-driven ship come in for a landing at JFK or LAX.
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Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
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Also, this simulation was about colonization. It's a lot easier to find something than to colonize it, especially in places that aren't very conducive to supporting life.
Did he do any research showing that it's impossible for 8 people to find a needle in a haystack by evaluating one needle at a time?
Maybe he could then go on to propose that these people "self-replicate" and create more people to look for the needle? That would make it go faster. However this obviously would cause problems because inevitably they would end up competing for resources or start forming unions to demand that they only need to look at 3 needles at a time.
Am I mistaken, or are this guy's statistics based on there being one other colony of "aliens" in the galaxy? What if there are a hundred colonies or a million? (A recent popular guess for number of starts in the milky way is 100 billion).
"I think there will be never a quantum theory to prove that the universe is non-deterministic, a perfect case against my God proofs, so hereby I announce that my belief in God is staunch."
What's common in both viewpoints? Obviously one is real and the other is fictional, but what they have in common is that they both make predictions that we can't possibly do something in the future, so basically assuming no new technologies or scientific understanding.
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Terrible idea. The Sylandro had one of them, and look what almost happened! Never trust a Melnorme.
Bitten by the ole RTFA bug eh. The quote from the article is
He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.
No mention of colonization there.
Plus
Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the "galactic habitable zone" of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.
So there's that too. Looks like you should have taken a look at the article first.
You'll have that sometimes...
The problem is that these assumptions are based on our (perhaps) flawed-physics knowledge. Our time is not their time. Speed of light could be slow to them. To think that space never ends and what could be out there is mind boggling.
Speculations like this are complete garbage. Even assuming aliens would have to build a craft to travel here is too much. Who is to say aliens search, travel, or think anything remotely like us? It is like Christopher Columbus saying no one would EVER travel to the moon because sailing there would take more than one person's lifetime.
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Who's to say that the Aliens arent God, who put us here in the first place? Aliens plant humans here, sit back and watch, checking up on us every so often.
Humans look at 9 planets in a solar system, and not very well mind you, and determine that life in the universe is unlikely? Who's to say that the Milky Way isnt 10% populated (1 habited planetary body per solar system)?
72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
:)
Hmm . . .
1.- self replicating probes... check
2.- enuff "intelligence" to determine something it sees/feels/etc is an actual lifeform... check
3.- humanity's own history making buggy, security lax software... check
4.- throw in some polymorphic stuff in the software so the probe can better itself...check
5.- an "easter egg", timebomb prank from a bender-obsessed hacker (MUST KILL HUMANS)... check
Possible end result? == The cylons
We are terribly limited by our own ignorance. We barely have an understanding of space travel, dark matter, string theory, time-and-space and many other things. I recall reading something once that said people in the early 20th century believed the human body would shake apart if we traveling faster than 25mph. The knowledge and intelligence of an alien civilization could be so far beyond our comprehension and knowledge that it's almost futile to even speculate. Right now, we think nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, however it wasn't too long ago people also believed the world was flat. I guess we can only make assumptions based on our current knowledge levels, but we must also take into account that there may be ways of doing things that we've simply not discovered yet, or cannot comprehend.
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I agree. He's only basing his assumptions on our current capabilities and applying them to an unknown alien civilization. Great that he's making these assumptions but his final conclusion, We have not yet been contacted by any extraterrestrial civilizations simple because they have not yet had the time to find us. Searching the Galaxy for life is a painstakingly slow process., is just jumping to conclusions, perhaps invalid for the work he did.
No one knows what aliens are going to look for in a planet. Our planet could be written off as an inhabitable nitrous sphere. They might be non-carbon based life forms. They could have progressed technologically much faster than we did as you suggested. By assuming aliens match our capabilities, he made an unstated assumption that was key to actually understanding the conclusion.
A more fitting conclusion from his work would be that it would take US 10 billion years to search a small portion of the Milky Way for life at our current technology levels.
The idea of even firing someone into space was foreign to us only a century ago. Frankly, I would be stunned if, within the next several thousand years, humanity didn't figure out a way to fold space. There are tons of physicists that work on that type of math already (and higher dimensional math to boot). The geeks at IBM, amongst several other labs worldwide, have already figured out quantum teleportation. http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportat ion/
Frankly, why would anyone ever even assume that someone would travel in a linear fashion, trundling along from star to star? Of course it's a waste of time and would take billions of years - and to assume that all foreign lifeforms would be restricted to a form of travel that we personally, within only half a century of space flight, could conceive of, is arrogant and shortsighted.
Yeah, but they might have had Queen Liz as the French queen, too.
Unless they have smarter astrophysicists.
We will be in a lot of trouble if the Cylons find us first.
Actually the "cylons" will find us first, it is far cheaper to send robotic explorers out. Then if anything interesting is found send the "manned" missions.
He covers these issues. The article summary is misleading.
Self replicating is ruled out due to risk. That sounds fairly silly since computers are computers. They do what we tell them to and not a thing more. But I suppose a few worrywarts are a good thing.
The number of probes is more like 2.08 million probes, if i'm reading him right, as his simulation was done at 1/260000 scale.
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... are already here
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If you've ever played "Spaceward Ho" you'll recognize that the author has proposed an asinine strategy for exploring the galaxy. Indeed, if you try to play Spaceward Ho by that sort of probing you'll rapidly get your tail kicked.
A more rational approach is exponential: You colonize a solar system. Then from that system you launch probes at anything reachable. Then you colonize everything reachable that qualifies. Rinse and repeat.
The main disc of the galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. Assume 10% light speed for probe travel time, light speed for information return and 50 years for each new colony to build infrastructure to a point where they can launch probes. You'd have 90% of the galaxy explored in three or four million years -- almost 4 orders of magnitude less than this fellow's estimate.
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Anyone who has read War of the Worlds know that the tiny microbes will protect us.
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Just because our planet has evolved the way it did doesn't mean that any other random planet that contains intelligent life evolved the same way. Assuming the vagueness of "ten billion years" is even remotely close to the available time for a species to evolve into a space traveling culture I would say there's actually a pretty good possibility that one of them is moving about the Universe at a rather quick pace. Hell, look at our own damn planet! We have cultures that are walking on the Moon, and cultures who don't even use the wheel. If you use that same comparison and place Earthlings at the wheel state then another planet far far away is zipping around at Warp, or spinning up their FTL, or jumping into worm holes, or constructing jump gates to enter hyperspace, or whatever Sci-Fi expression of extreme space travel you prefer. Or maybe there's one of each! Or maybe there is no other intelligent life anywhere in the entire universe, and never will be until we colonize it.
There's a lot out there that we don't know anything about.
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I do... and so does some Fermi guy
If you assume that ET exists, and if you assume by the sheer magnitude of the universe that there's quite a few of them, then by now one of them would have invented FTL. One of those would have been around far longer than mankind. Imagine mankind with FTL travel, we'd have the stars colonized in no time at all. Therefore, if ET exists (I prefer to think it's a safe assumption, otherwise the universe seems like a huge waste of space), and FTL exists, the overwhelming odds are that they would be here.
I prefer to believe that FTL travel is simply not possible, which explains why they're not here. Yeah, I'm a depressing realist.
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Rasmus Bjoerk obviously hasn't met half of my ex-girlfriends. Not even probing allowed me to understand what the heck was going on there.
Oh.... we've found you, all right....
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The book does touch that point. Actually this novel and its sequel "The Shattered Sphere" would make a great mini series. Let's hope they haven't found us already and are just sleeping in the solar system. ;)
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Larry Niven had a story similar to what you talking about that involved chocolate covered manhole covers.
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Come on, they haven't visited us yet? There were yet another case of alien abduction as reported by the World's Weekly last week.
...and they high-tailed it out of here when they saw the kind of idjits we elect to government.
why would any self-respecting advanced civization want to hang out in this trailer trash area of the universe?
More likely, the time it takes for a species to self-evolve beyond comprehension is much less than developing interstellar travel.
Why would super-intelligent quarks need to physically move themselves to another part of the galaxy? Better view?
The article seems to assume that we are representative of all intelligent races and there for it would take the length of time that he puts forth.
As long as we're speculating let me. Maybe of all the intelligent races we are retards. Look at what we're doing to our own planet.
Maybe they found us a long time ago but don't want to make contact with retards like us.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
One of these Turing machines reached Earth about 4 billion years ago. It first had to start by building very simple amino acids, then it graduated to proteins, then to RNA and then to DNA, and then these DNA machines built bodies around them and started using natural selection to evolve into more and more capable organisms. The final aim of these DNA structures is to build powerful radio beacons and send the information back to the original aliens who created these molecules and scattered them to the (solar) wind.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
given all the previous arguments about the exponential abilities of self-replicating probes, i'll just ignore the billions of years theory proposed by this "researcher".
besides.. aliens have clearly found us and decided to stay the *&@#! clear.
Haxor: why can't we go visit that pretty blue planet?
Blixan: prime directive, ensign! avoid interaction with primitive species. interaction includes detection. if they even know we are out there, we will have affected their society.
Haxor: aww. but they seem so nice.
IT's not the ACCELERATION, it's the DECELERATION. Even if you could apply some force to slowly accelerate a massive space ship, once you got it up to that speed wouldn't it take K^2 (squared) units of fuel to slow it down it again? So let's say it takes a million tons of some super fuel to get your space ark up to speed. Wouldn't it take a million million tons to park it again?
The scientist makes an arrogant assumption based on OUR level of technology. Another race may have much more sophisticated and advanced tech and ergo be able to find us much faster. We could be watched at this point and not even know it. It may take US 10 billion years if you base this conclusion on the current state of technology. But other breakthroughs and new inventions can eventually trump this. It is another case of Science stating that the world is flat so to speak. The idea that it must be true until proven wrong. Science is not an exact science. A scientist saying things are a certain way based on a theory cannot be right until the theory is proven true and absolutely correct. This declaration is no different. At this point it is just a theory and opinion.
It's worth noting that about as many people in the US believe there are extraterrestrials who have visited us as consider themselves to be devout Christians.
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We are currently broadcasting the galactic equivalent of "Eat at Earth" sign. Remember we consume "lesser" lifeforms for food. I do love a good steak! Who knows if the aliens who find Earth will consider us as equals or as appetizers.
I am sure their galactic physicians will recommend they don't eat too many humans from the Northwestern Continent due to cholesterol or something, but that they can eat all the yellow humans from the east they want, even if they will be hungry again in a few parsecs.
I only look human.
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10 billion years for search sounds about right, if ET uses Windows or Java.
Well where are they then? If they _may_ have such ability they would be teleporting back and forth to earth. The reasons to come to earth are pretty compelling:
1) Help us
2) Exterminate us
3) Mess with us, just for fun
4) See if they could possibly learn anything from us
5) Enslave us (also for fun) -- we could be their bitches and scratch their backs and polish their shoes...ok maybe not this one
Reasons not to come to earth and avoid us even if they know about us:
1) Possibility that we could infect them with some virus
2) If they are hippie aliens then perhaps some altruistic reason like "don't mess with other planetary echo-systems" or "save the endangered alien races"
To me it seems that they have a lot more reasons to visit us if they could. But they haven't yet, so this makes me doubt the fact that any civilization has such technology at this particular instant.
I would make the same argument for time travel. If time travel into the past was possible _ever_ we would see visitors from the future. Sure the first ones to discover it might be careful not to mess with the past but there will be some nut jobs who will.
I'd hold off on criticizing others for a lack of imagination. Don't you realize that self replicating probes will doom us? We will be galactic spammers, the aliens will wipe us out as a nuisance. Or our probes will harvest the planet they pray towards, the aliens will wipe us out as heretics and blasphemers. At a very minimum the probes will be crossing the border without proper documentation, the fines and impound fees could leave us in "debtors prison" for millennia.
They could have swept by, mapped the planet fully, dropped to look around, grabbed some soil samples wrote their catalog entry, and left to the next one during 99.9% of human history and we wouldn't have noticed.
Outside of human history - which is just a sliver of whole earthtime - there has been a lot of time on this planet where not much was going on, intelligence-wise. "We've found another planet of ferns, sir."
Or they could just not be particularly impressed with us. We seem to behave as though we are certain that we are best-looking girl in school so any available boy who doesn't ask us out must be gay or afraid. Take a look around - as a species we fight and squabble endlessly over dirt, water, bizarre ideas and myths. The top quarter of the race could give a crap that the bottom quarter endlessly suffers and dies when there's plenty of food and cures around for all. Maybe instead of sweeping in as benevolent parents to uplift us, they just see us as yet another batch of troublemakers who would not make good company. Above all, a people who definitely do not need a warp drive to take our ways on tour. To them, we could be just another example of a type that either grows out of this stage or eventually kills itself off. When we're worth talking to - and far less likely to shoot them or other folks - they may decloak/pull off their masks/come back.
Huntred
Got to get started on Jump gate technology... Can't travel to the Rim in regular space...
What's this guy smoking? hasen't he heard of the "String Theory"? Maybe the aliens all ready found a way
to fold space/time and jump through a singularity.
LMFAO!
What is the probability that we are the first intelligent species in the galaxy? It's vanishingly small. Therefore, if galactic colonization were possible, it's most likely that Earth would've been colonized already.
It's similar to the argument that time travel is impossible: if time travel is possible, then why haven't we seen any time travelers?
Yes, there are other possible solutions to these questions, but it's interesting to think about.
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Plus, Cassini isn't travelling nearly that fast. 30km/s, not 30,000. That's 1/10000th of c.
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I think there's a big assumption out there that aliens are only a couple hundred years beyond us, when in reality they could be millions of years beyond us in evolutionary terms and technology. So I doubt the ability of an astrophysicist to legitimately and accurately be able to determine the capabilities of an alien civilization with even so much as 1 billion years of advancement ahead of human civilization. Think of where we are now with our "understanding" of physics and the universe, and how far we will be if we continue to move forward (although granted, there are many forces out there that, for some reason, want to stop us from furthering human civilization) for say... 10 million years? Sorry, not buying his theory.
If the galaxies are to the universe as the universe is to the greater existence of matter, then there are millions of universes. And I'm not talking odd dimensions. As far as we know the universe is infinite right ?, why do we think that ? If we could see the edge of the universe then it can't be infinite can it. And if we can't see the edge, it stands to reason we can't see what lies beyond the edge. So Multiple universes can exist just as multiple galaxies can exist. What we call "the big bang" could be equivalent to a super nova in a galaxy.
So, who says that the "aliens" have had time to explore the inner reaches of "our" universe. It stands to reason that being more advanced should mean being older (as a civilisation), and that would also mean being closer to the beginning of our universe, or in other words nearer the "edge". So they might simply have struck out in a different direction first, into another universe.
For a thought experiment, replace universe with galaxy and galaxy with solar system throughout this comment. I think that there is essentially no difference other than scale.
Or maybe you are of a religious persuasion, and would prefer to think that we are somehow "special" in the universe. I wouldn't like to risk the consequences of such arrogance.
I think the real debate should be about self-replicating probes. Is the author assuming that every civilization capable of building these is automatically freaked out by potential doomsday scenarios, to the extent that none will be built? Even if it is foolish, I found that it pays to expect more foolishness in the universe rather than less.
Even if you could apply some force to slowly accelerate a massive space ship, once you got it up to that speed wouldn't it take K^2 (squared) units of fuel to slow it down it again?
Say what? Where'd you get the idea that it takes more fuel to slow down than to speed up? Acceleration and deceleration are the same thing, change in delta-v.
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The article seems to assume that alien civilizations are looking just for us. A more interesting line of thought (at least to me) would be how likely it would be for these civilizations to find each other. It is quite likely that there are other places in the galaxy in which two civilizations are within close proximity -- possibly within the same solar system. For example, if Mars had an advanced civilization similar to our own we would have discovered this back in the 70's. Also, this search for "civilization" strikes me as being a tad Earth-centric. More than likely a alien race would have a concept of civilization radically different from our own. We would not be able to understand them, nor they us (and I'm not just talking language barrier here). We may not even recognize it as intelligence.
Because you and I are here , I know there are others elsewhere. They might not be on the interwebs (yet) but they are out there.
I am surprised at how many comments there are dimissing this paper as using poor assumptions, being poorly thought out or lacking imagination.
First, why should we assume that the aliens would have god-like technology? The paper addresses a 1000x increase in speed for the probes and assumes they would incredibly well-engineered to not fail after thousands or millions of years. That seems like pretty advanced technology. I don't know of anything that we have built that would last 1000 years without some sort of maintenance or intervention. Sure, we could assume there are repair systems on board, but what repairs the repair system? Even if we ignore that, where does it get the materials to make repairs if something happens between solar systems?
Second, why would there be an urge to send thousands or millions of these probes? If the probes are going to be strong enough to survive, smart enough to avoid problems during the trip and detect any signs of intelligence/civilization they are probably fairly expensive and difficult to make. Sure, we can imagine a technological society where manufacturing is automated to the point where robots land on an asteroid, mine it, construct factories and shiny new probes are made, but this assumes a very high level of technology. While we may have an idea how to do it, we are absolutely nowhere near the technology required to actually do it.
Finally, remember that all solar systems aren't on a nice straight line and that you would actually have to maneuver to go near them and check for signs of civilization. Sure, we could fix that by using many more probes, but see paragraph #2. There is also some diminishing returns with this approach. You could make enough probes so there is 1 per solar system, but having half that many that steer slightly to visit 2 systems is probably cheaper. So, imagine all the acceleration that needs to occur for this to occur - which means more fuel and a lot of time spent at lower velocities.
Instead of pointing to video games or science fiction shows for the "right way" to do this, how about applying some real-world assumptions? I mean assuming that the aliens exist in the first place, (although it seems likely), have god-like tech and FTL, and would want to devote all of their resources to searching the galaxy seems pretty unreasonable to me. However, having moderately better tech and devoting a moderate amount of resources (in the number of probes) seems like reasonable assumptions to me.
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i firmly believe they have been here, seen us and decided we were definitely not worth a laser shot; they probably beam our escapades to intelligent life forms in the universe as "high comedy"; they're all just waiting and betting on when the end will take place.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Thanks for the summary. You must be new here.
I read a comic that said somehthing along the lines of "I think the surest sign that there is intellegent life out there is that none have tried to contact us."
I think we've got something, sir. The report is only a fragment from a probe droid in the sol system, but it's the best lead we've had.
We have thousands of probe droids searching the galaxy. I want proof, not leads!
The visuals indicate life readings.
It could mean anything. If we followed every lead...
But, sir, the sol system is supposed to be devoid of humaoid forms.
That's it. The humans are there.
There are so many uncharted worlds...
That is the system! Set your course for the sol system. General, prepare your men!
Those Slylandro can be a real pain in the rear though. "We come in peace". BLAM!
A link to an actual scientific paper in a Slashdot summary? What is the world coming to?
http://outcampaign.org/
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Yes, its not so much "FTL" travel as taking shortcuts through space-time. To the ETs, we Earthers have only learned to travel on the "surface" of space. The ones that do (allegedly) visit Earth are bending the rules ("prime directive") and mostly remain in stealth-mode. The more advanced races send the occasional message that we're not joining the federation anytime soon until we stop destroying our planet and each other(so we're officially quarantined, but we get the occasional drive-by) We are slowly learning how we co-create our experience---so while we're around dimension 4.1, these guys are working with dimensions 5 & 6 (so space/time IS a bit different for them) I guess this would be such races as the Arcturians & Pleiadians -Rev. Whackjob http://talkingtoets.com/
Has any one ever given thought to what if WE are the first advanced race?
I mean how old is our planet and life on it compared to the Galaxy?
We have had a fair number of mass extinctions but over all I'd say we've been pretty lucky.
Money is the root of all evil?
Hence our inate desire to find the _source_.
Who says travelling faster than light will ever be possible? We've never observed anything doing so, and we have some reasonably good theory that suggests that it's impossible.
http://outcampaign.org/
Lewis and Clark reported that since it took them 18 months to cover 3352 square miles (assuming 1/2 mile on each side of the river over the journey), it would take about 23 THOUSAND YEARS to cover the 52 million square miles of land on Earth, not counting Antarctica.
That Cassini spacecraft is moving at 71581.9613 miles per hour. Not bad...
[%] Cingular Ringtones
I haven't RTFA, but if they're looking for an "intelligent" civilization, a probe visiting every planet would be completely unnecessary. They'd only have to be close enough to detect radio transmissions. Assuming their equipment could detect the faintest of signals, and the first regular high powered transmissions occurred 80-90 years ago, that's enormous compared to finding a single planet.
Von Neumann machines will colonize the galaxy in direct competition with the species creating them, they won't explore for them.
Deleted
because the farthest part of the galaxy is about 80,000 light-years away from us
Has anyone been there to verify this? I know there are some forumlas for figuring this out, but it's all hogwash to me. What does the "edge of the galaxy" look like. Sounds more like the "edge of the world" a few centuries ago.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
We've seen this in STTM... V'ger came home and destroyed the sending race in a futile attempt to contact the "creator."
Face it, we're not going to meet aliens, because they've already been destroyed by their own creations.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
This would be great. Life would suddenly have a meaning. We would not die in vain, but actually keep a superior race well fed, and at the same time I assume this superior race would be bright enough to regulate the world population for optimal living quality. I just hope they like a their food steaked or cooked. I`m not very much into being eaten alive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You have to assume too many things to know how long it will take.
I can think of a few;
How common is life, and from that point, how quickly do advanced alien races propagate?
How do we know what the limits of space travel are, when we have only managed to get people to the moon?
What does it matter what calculations you make, when you pull numbers out of your rear?
Until "Danish astrophysicist Rasmus Bjoerk" actually meets some other advanced race besides the Swedish, how can he assume anything? According to him, we will need 1 Billion years (at least) for him to be proven right -- after that, the odds go up.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
The study in question does not even address the Fermi Paradox in any meaningful sense, much less "resolve" it. In fact, if this study is being offered as a resolution of the Fermi Paradox then it suggests the researcher does not understand why the Fermi Paradox is a paradox at all.
The fundamental difficulty with any explanation offered for the complete absence (so far) of any sign of other intelligent life in the universe is that the proposed explanation has to be universally valid.
The span of time for colonization, or dispersal of replicating probes, or of building vast telescopically detectable artifacts is so great that even one single exception from any proposed explanation would be capable of generating ubiquitous evidence in a tiny fraction of the life of the Universe.
Simply describing some model for exploration, and then arguing that this model won't do the job says nothing about other models. This study apparently does not consider the geometric growth that occurs with any exploration program that uses some form of replication of explorers, for example. If replication is thought to be impossible then the study would have the high hurdle of convincingly demonstrating this. (The material evidence of life on Earth seems to argue persuasively against it though.)
Arguments that "interstellar travel is impossible" would qualify for explaining why alien artifacts aren't being found locally (but do not address communication signals or telescopically detectable artifacts), but require convincing arguments that this is indeed true. On the contrary, physics does not seem to make this impossible at all, just very costly and slow. Too costly and slow for anyone to bother? Not even one single civilization?
The Fermi Paradox seems to be telling something important about the Universe. If only we knew what it is...
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Every copy of something introduces error. The instant you introduce a physical replicating system in the real world you also introduce evolution. At which point it stops working for you and starts working for itself.
Or, you could just program them to destroy themselves if the has of their program doesn't match. Evolution requires a LOT of diversity, not to mention competition for resources. The odds of getting even one mutant would be astronomically (heh) small with a simple hash.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I heard they found Osama before Bush could find him...
That's why I laugh when people spot human-sized UFO craft. If there are UFOs here, they're microscopic.
Assumptions are just that, assumptions. You can laugh all you want, but to me, it just shows one more scientific dogma. The attitude of "knowing it all" is sadly very prevalent here on Slashdot, and probably why so many spend time writing here, instead of discovering new stuff.
The problem is lack of creativity. In 0.5 seconds, I thought of nano-UFOs. Send one, or trillions of those, and let them dig into a moon or planet to rebuilt itself into a fully fledged macro-sized "UFO". Or, maybe if you want to "recreate yourself in your own image", why not send out organic "bombs"? Etc. etc. There are so many possibilities when you dont restrict your mind.
Just because you cant think of it, doesnt mean it isnt possible or thinkable. Please free your mind! There is so much more to know than we already know! And instead of giving focus to more effective ways to kill people, why not science of life?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Did the scientist consider "electromagnetic radiation" in his calculations about "Probes seeking out only likely solar systems?" We have 50+ years of radio emissions streaming out at the speed of light from our Solar System. So that once a society reaches the industrial age, they would most likely be a lot more noticeable.
Maybe in a few decades, we will learn that we need to be more circumspect, and try and hide better from alien races.
Until then, a probe doesn't need to stumble upon us, it might be able to see patterns in radio transmissions. Who knows, if a race can figure out how to migrate through space, it might just know how to detect life from a distance (which I find highly likely).
They should mod this topic as "speculation."
>> And on Slashdot, I have the right NOT TO READ THE ARTICLE, before giving my valuable opinion.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I reckon theres a Slashdot survey on the best way to explore:
How would you prefer to travel?
a. A blue Police Box that can traverse space and time, with a hot British former 'teen star' that is obviously in love with your weirdness.
b. A big ancient ring that can take you anywhere where there is a corresponding ancient ring, but you keep bumping into Egyption dog people who try to kill you.
c. A large dinner shaped spaceship that does warp factors, but you get to shoot at klingons and make sexy time with green chicks (remember its all about the Journey!) Just dont get assimilated by Bjork!
d. Travelling with the Robinson family and a stupid robot that shouts "Danger" long after it stopped being funny. Oh and a pedophile.
e. In a ship that can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs - With a great big hairy Wooky and a gay robot.
e. Spending time on the only ship to have survived an attack by robots with KITT in their face, where it is a daily battle to stay alive.
f. On a moon that was flung out of orbit by a massive thermonuclear explosion initiated by the build up of magnetic radiation, which there is much debate as to it being caused by global warming.
g. Traveling across universes with a guy that looks like Mike Moore, where each new universe you 'slide' into is exactly like being on LSD.
h. On a ship with a dorky hologram an evolved cat, a computer with an IQ of 6000 and a very stupid robot, but every day is hilarious!
I. The space shuttle. (yawn)
I think most people would agree that papers like this are based upon so many assumptions that they are pretty much worthless, regardless of which cosmology you believe in. It's just a product of our affinity for math and our desire to feel like we have more confidence in some sciences than we can actually achieve in the absence of input-output experiments (ie, to varying degrees, astronomy, geology and archaeology).
But it's interesting to note that the biggest single assumption in this type of logic is that the universe is not infinite in time and space. In a static electric universe, without a beginning to base your calculations upon, chances are high that neither stars nor galaxies have determinable ages. The entire system is essentially "transient" and papers like this are completely meaningless. As painful as it is to imagine it, aliens could have started seeding the universe an infinite amount of time ago. It's possible that not even they could tell you when they started. This is of course no more painful though than imagining what happened before the Big Bang.
I've also seen it mentioned amongst people who are aware of Electric Universe Theory that the more you understand plasma, the more the plasma of the universe appears to constitute a living organism. The fact that plasma can form double-layers to "protect" its charge suggests parts of a living entity. And if Chip Arp is correct, the notion that spiral galaxies can "spit" out quasars might be the process by which the organism spreads out of its original domain. The stars are the organism's cells and mobile charged particles act as the nutrients for the plasma, which would ironically be like the organism's blood. Within this context, the rocky planets are a rare, harmless non-plasma pocket where we humans, like tiny viruses, can multiply and possibly expand.
Taking the idea one step further, another strange curiosity of EU Theory is that all of the plasma phenomenon within the universe we've observed thus far are actually electrical loads and transmission lines. Once you've become acquainted with the theory, you begin to wonder what is in fact the *source* of the power. You'd have to conclude that we're likely not in range to view the source, but this is a very interesting question. It's the EU Theory version of asking how old the Big Bang Universe is.
Weird shit. Once the public starts to learn more about plasma, I think it's inevitable that it will become a popular topic for strange ideas like this.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
People have proposed send out rocket-robot-factories which would make more copies of themselves after arrival and so on. These would result in huge numbers of probes after sufficient number of generations, even if a generation took 100,000 years. Maybe they'd be in the sahpe of large balck rectangles. Or maybe they'd call themselves Omibus.
this just in, 1000 telephone sanitizers landed at Kennedy Space Port.
Can I appeal to everyones common sense for a moment?
:-)
Your a civilization, a sentient race.
You have mastered and solved the distance problem between Stars and have decided to explore space.
(i.e. I am assuming that they would be like us, since we haven't solved the distance problem, we know it is impractical to do so, due to the time constraints of waiting for all the probes to return/radio signals etc. Using this train of thought, they wouldn't even try until they solved the distance problem, just like us.)
What would be your first mission?
I will assume like us, they are interested in other forms of sentient life.
Like us, I assume they will have technology to seek out star systems using automated telescopes for worlds that have chemical signatures that make it very probable higher forms of life exist there.
I am assuming they wouldn't systematically look at EVERY planet using a brute search such as what the professor is proposing.
Even WE can get spectrographic information about worlds now outside our solar system, I assume this for them would be a trivial problem to automate a search.
Given this information, I think the professor needs to go back to the drawing board, as even WE wouldn't look for sentient life at the center of the milky way, for example, as we know active star regions are too violent to allow life to follow a undisturbed evolutionary/creationary cycle for sentient life.
(My Apologies to those who worship the dogma of science or those who worship the dogma of religion. For those of you in between and do both, congratulations your a sane human being.)
Again, if the scientific model of discovering information is truly the same no matter where you are in the Universe, I assume these assumptions hold true for any life, and that we are not special.
A intelligent search could be completed far faster than the quoted "billions of years".
I assume these Aliens have common sense enough not to use a intelligent sorting/search algorithm, unlike what the professor suggests. (i.e. What worlds have intelligent life? Mmmm..I know! Lets Bubble sort them into life vs. probably no life.)
I wish I could comment on our own search attempts. Ok I will.
SETI=Looking for Radio Signals=Wate of cash to the tune of over a billion and counting.
If the whole idea of looking for an advanced civilization using radio search methods hasn't dawned on anyone here as stupid, let me enlighten you with a few facts SETI doesn't want you to know about:
1) Radio waves are absorbed by just about any sort of gas or dust material. Don't believe me? Ever use your cell phone lately? Think its crappy listening to someone a few miles away? Try it a billion miles away.
The likely hood SETI is going to pick up a signal is so small, I wager 100 Trillion dollars later, they still won't have a signal.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
we don't yet know enough about gravity to know how fast such a thing really could happen.
And then there is the purpose of doing so. In other word: why?
Sounds like a version of Intelligent design.
Which I don't say is impossible -- just that counting on ID in a classroom, where you have to teach science is pointless and merely to make Fundies happy.
I think that humans, in a few more decades, may very well want to "seed" nearby planets with modified earth DNA. The compulsion to do so will be hard to ignore. We could create food or useful organic crops on Mars and Venus -- or just experiment without ecological disaster on earth (or test ways to fix ecological disasters). There will be a lot of protest at first, but history shows that we ALWAYS do something that provides a profit -- whether or not it benefits people or any temporary form of ethics (worrying about Stem Cell, is just a ruse to get patents in the private domain, for instance).
So, I don't know any way we could disprove that Aliens have not visited earth or manipulated genes in some way. The debate against ID is more about good science -- not trying to disprove every possible explanation.
We also might be a creation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Who knows if that 90% "junk DNA" encodes for Meatball + a delicious sauce?
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
... and after having looked around in a representative sample of continents (about five) and having seen how most humans are being treated by just small groups in power, they decided not to contact the President of the U.S., the Secretary General of United Nations or whoever the proper person for representing mankind might have been in their view. Instead, they preferred to leave silently and to go elsewhere. As of this writing, they are said to be already some hundred light years away, lightheartedly heading for the sagittarius region. ;-)
We've seen groups of things travelling at greater than the speed of light (both sound and light)....granted the individual waves do not, but the collective [word used intentionally] does. So, we just put a whole bunch of probes in some loopy PVC pipe and, "poof", we can get across the galaxy in a fraction of the time.
- Faster-than-Light-24167.shtml
Layne
References:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/11/1
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Light-that-Travels
http://www.physorg.com/news88249076.html
> The ones that do (allegedly) visit Earth are bending the
> rules ("prime directive") and mostly remain in stealth-mode.
You realize the "prime directive" was a bass-ackwards attempt to explain why alien races didn't hassle with the Earth, rather than any sound philosophical concept, right?
F*** any aliens who refuse to interfere in our planet on the principle of it. The @$$holes are our enemy, not our friend.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Keep in mind too, our first inter-terrestrial transmissions were Hitlers speech in the 1936 Olympics. That's a mere 70 years, and in a 70 light-year radius, there isn't much out there. We also do not transmit at the powers required for intelligible communication. The "aliens" might see a bit of static on the channel, but to them it's probably not much more than random white noise. They might simply not know we exist!
A living ship full of muppets and alien cuties.
Man, you really need that seminar!
He doesn't even consider non-material, photon-based probing methods, which would increase the rate of exploration by a factor of 10.
Doesn't matter. Light only travels so fast, and we've only been here, what, 10,000 years? Nobody further than 10,000 light years away could have possibly found us yet. And a 10,000 light year sphere is well less than 4% of the galaxy.
This whole study is kind of dumb, because it doesn't matter that you can explore 4% of the galaxy in 4 billion years when we've only been here for 10,000 years. Even if they did come to earth, it's almost certain that when they were here, they found either nothing or some bacteria and kept going.
paintball
An AI (being made of software) is a much better colonizer because it can travel as a signal at the speed of light. It just needs something to receive it, implement the virtual machine on which it runs, and then get it enough CPU power to run.
Once you tech civilization even below our level, you will get something to receive it and presuming you design well, the virtual machine implementation should not be hard.
The best way to get enough CPU to run on a backwards planet would be to get a large network of slower primitive computers to run your code. To do that, you would want to come up with a problem they would like to solve using massively parallel computing, and then introduce a program such as a networked screen saver. You would tell the people that by running the program, their CPU would be dedicated to finding traces of alien intelligence in radio signals. Many of them would then run your program when their computers were idle, and you could build up a vast enough network to finally start thinking at a decent speed, rather than the terribly sluggish thinking you have to do before the network is up. You would not even be lying to those who think they are running a search for extraterrestrial intelligence @ home, for they would indeed be assisting in the search for one.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The most likely reason we don't see them is because they are all headed right at us, and we won't see them until after they get here.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I someone already accidentally flicked on the subspace transmitter directing the Delta-quadrant, then we are in big BIG trouble...
...then its a bit inaccurate. Teh moon was flung out of orbit cuz we were dumping nuclear waste on it and it all got a bit too close together and went bang. Kirk: "To boldly go..." Koenig: "I used to run a garbage dump. But I f*cked it up."
Plus, they have to life with the same laws of physics we do. Space (like they say) is big, really big, and it takes a lot of fuel and a lot of energy to move things around, not to mention lots of time.
IAALS.
They haven't taken into account that other worlds may be far advanced than Earth. They assume that earth is older than any other planetary system. They haven't taken into account of the many UFO sightings. Plus the many UFO's on record as being reported as no explanation other than a UFO. Their report is just biased too me.
Do not meddle with UFO's. For you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.
Deleted
It just takes one with a broken self-destruct. Then natural selection will take over.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Hmm, but the thing is that it's not a fact that they are looking for life forms. The primary objective could be different - ex. resources, or a planet they could inhabit.
Taking into account the fact that our society is pretty materialistic, I doubt that our probes will be looking for life. Most certainly, they'll be looking for useful raw material (and perhaps for life, among other things.. but definitely not the primary target).
The saddest poem
and just didn't find us interesting enough to stop. Or were a little shy and couldn't think of anything witty to break the ice.
Let us roll back the clock, say, 200 years: A person up to date with the technology of the time would have no knowledge of airplanes, cars etc would make the some silly statement that it would be impossible for a person to ever cross USA in one day. They'd also say that it is very unlikely to find a particular quote in some random book within three months of searching, Google etc changes that. Change the technology and understanding of physics and we'd laugh at anyone saying something as stupid as that now.
But won't people 200 years from know laugh at our pathetic understanding of technology and physics? If there is intelligent life (I don't think so personally), it might just be a couple hundred or thousand or whatever years ahead of us and would thus not be bound by the limiting assumptions we make today.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But I disagree with his numbers. Searching all of the galaxy would be MUCH quicker. His assumption of sending out a fixed number of probes is wrong. In fact his assumed plan is so bad no one would ever do it that way. The way to do it, in fact the only way that could ever work is to build a probe that can build probes. You build 100 of these and each of these builds 100 and after 10 generations you have a galaxy filled up with probes. If there is anything to be found you WILL find it that way. So, I'd not be surprised at all to find four probes in our Solar system noe as we speak, all of which have found us and all having sent a message back to their builders. The message will take thousands of years to get there and maybe the builders are long dead or lost interest in listening or forgot how to listen or forgotten that these probes were ever sent.
The best plan would NOT be to even bother to send a message back home. The probes would be one-way comunication. The probes would simply say "Someone built by great, great, grandparent and they used to live over there. Would you guys please send a message back? I can't yell that loud."
Sending out eight probes with eight sub-probes each is a stupid plan. It would take "forever" for only 64 probes to search the galaxy and worse then that, each probe would have to continue to function for an unreasonable length of time. I doubt humans will ever know how to build a machine that can last a billion years but if they build a machine that can build a machine they will not have to.
Exactly, who say Aliens - if they exist - hasn't come up with some vastly superior way of travel (maybe instant teleportation, etc). And even if they do know about our presence, why would they care? There are most likely millions of other planets that are available, why bother fighting over one that has inferior beings on it, that will most likely destroy themselves within the next few centuries. We most likely have nothing of value to them, so what would be the purpose of them "contacting us"
--
We are the only ones with assholes to stick instruments in.
He's assuming you need to actually visit a star to see if there is life orbiting it. It's far easier to look through a telescope, and then perhaps send out probes to a few specific stars that look hopeful. We could easily have a comprehensive list of potential habitable planets in 50 years time (at least within a few hundred light years, quite probably more). Sending a probe to each, travelling at 0.1c would have all the nearby potential planets checked out within 10,000 years, maybe. I haven't worked out how far away from Earth you need to go to cover 4% of the Milky Way, but I doubt it would take more than a million years to do such an exploration.
Of course, if SETI is right, we can find life without ever having to visit it, just by listening for it. In which case, the entire galaxy can be "explored" in 100,000 years (the galaxy is 100,000ly in diameter, so it would take that long for radio singles from the furthest stars to reach us), our neighbourhood can be "explored" in a few thousand years. It's important to note that almost all those years pass before you actually start looking, but if we're talking about why aliens haven't reached us, those are the numbers we're interested it.
The reason no alien race has found us is simply because they aren't looking.
Billions of years ago, the Progenitors figured out space travel and mapped the universe.
They uplifted (genetically modified) other species until they were smart enough to fly space ships, created galactic civilization, made the rules, then left.
Every couple hundred-thousand years someone comes by to update the map and to do a survey.
Besides, our soloar system was left fallow after a war destroyed the life on Mars and Venus 80 million years ago.
0100001001100101011010010110111001100111 0100100001110101011011010110000101101110
You realize the "prime directive" was a bass-ackwards attempt to explain why alien races didn't hassle with the Earth...
Ignoring that it was a human idea, yes.
, rather than any sound philosophical concept, right?
Bzzt. Wrong. There are primitive tribes right here on Earth that the general population is not allowed to trade with. Right here in the United States are the dim echoes of the Native Americans, who suffered both from European incursion and their own adaptation of the cheapest elements of European Culture.
"Let them evolve on their own, or they're become part of us" is a pretty good philosophical concept. It's just one step removed from "Free Will."
This is EXACTLY Fermi's Paradox. He said if there was even one advanced civilization, they would have done exactly the above and they would be here. But they are not here. So we must assume we are the first.
it could be the case that civilazations are so un-common that only one or two exist in a billion years span. We have no way to know.
This guy's hysterical! He gave me a real giggle. An honest to god, little-girl giggle. I just can't believe how stupid this man can be - or why he wasted his time (and my 120 seconds - which I want back BTW!) doing this stuff.
Let's see why...
In 1422, I'm sure the best mathematicians of the day would be able to confidently predict that Intercontinental trade is "Next to Impossible" or "Only in non-perishable goods, due to the extreme delays in delivery". And that "Exploring the remainder of the Earth's surface will take a thousand years" based on similar knowledge of the day.
So, what this guy is trying to say, is that in 10 billion years, humanity (or any other technology based culture for that matter) can not invent something to get probes to relativistic velocities, or simply bypass "C" entirely, by folding space-time by using the entire output of a red-gaint star as a power source.
Hell, he doesn't even mention von Neumann machines (Which I believe will be one of the very few "DO NOTS" in a Galactic Culture) which could explore the entire galaxy remarkably quickly.
No, this article isn't worth the electrons used to push it: it assumes absolutely no movement of technology OVER A 10 BILLION YEAR TIME SCALE.
Holy Moly - he's wrong by a factor of a BILLION. Because in 10 years time we *could* well have already developed FTL, Fusion Power and Force Fields.
Thanks for the laugh, Rasmus Bjork, you truly are a useless Djork.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
...Aliens have not visited earth or manipulated genes in some way.Average weight of humans up... sounds like and interstellar Hansel and Gretal
Help test the
1. It's incredibly stable. It's launching an exploration program using probes that are going to take billions of years to get a result back to the original civilization. It expects to be around to pick them up.
By the same logic:
2. Individual members are incredibly long-lived, or the society is static and conservative enough that individual goals are submerged. They expect that the people around in a few billion years still care about the stuff they're doing, AND they care about the people who'll be around then.
The technology he's postulating is also very advanced.
3. Large scale space-based industry is routine enough for them to build probes capable of refuelling themselves using the raw materials in an as-yet-unexplored solar system, with surplus fuel to launch and recover the sub-probes. If they can do that, they can do the same thing in their own solar system.
If the probes are cheap by their standards, there's no reason not to keep building them indefinitely. So let's say they're expensive. Let's say it takes this civilization a hundred years to build a probe. Why do they stop after 800 years? They're long-lived, stable, conservative, so assuming they have the will to do it in the first place why would they stop building probes? As the author notes, probes break down.
So what happens when you add another probe into the search every century, indefinitely? Well, after a million years you've got 10,000 probes out there. Now you're looking at a search time measured in millions rather than billions of years, and it only takes millions of years to do it.
But why are they doing this? Looking for planets to colonize, perhaps? If they're just looking for civilizations they'd do much better depending on "signal intelligence".
But if they've got the ability to send out colonies, even the most conservative long-lived space-based civilization is going to figure out eventually that they don't actually need habitable planets to support a permanent colony. It's riskier without habitable planets, but even if the planetless colony is 10 times less stable than the home system you're still better off with your civilization in two baskets. And before long (in the terms of this civilization) you've got a roughly spherical shell of colonized star systems, expanding as fast as they can reach new systems. At 0.1C colonizing (not just exploring) the galaxy is going to take mere millions of years.
On the other hand, what if the self-replicating probes are members of the designing species themselves?
So either this level of technology is impossible to achieve, or we're back to the question of why no species has done it yet. There's lots of plausible answers, of course, but this paper sheds no light on them.
The real reason they haven't found us yet is there aren't enough aliens contributing spare computer cycles to the STI@Home project (Search for Terrestrial Intelligence). Come on, folks; if you're an alien and you have a computer connected to the internet, why let your home computer waste millions of CPU cycles running a screen saver when it could be analyzing STI data?
It's funny... Alien lifeforms are always thought of as highly advanced compared to us. I think it's worth considering just how complex this world is (just think of how we --- apparently without too much effort --- get from an idea to communicating that idea to others. Then try to describe exactly what an idea is, that is, a generic idea --- nothing specific (and a headache with pictures doesn't count.)
I think it's pretty darn impressive that we ever managed to invent any higher means of communication! (If you're going to start arguing that "animals have language too", take a look at Hockett's Design Features of Language and think about it.)
Probably the most hilarious scenario would be, if it turned out that there was actually life somewhere else in the Milky Way, but it hadn't even advanced to the state of making fire yet. I mean, seriously, that'd be a kick in the nuts of every sci-fi fan out there (not that I particularly dislike them or anything, I quite like some sci-fi myself).
"Live free or don't."
... is big. Really, really big. I mean, you may think it's a long way down to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to space.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
1) There are only eight planets. Do keep up.
2) Who's to say that the Aliens arent God, who put us here in the first place? Me, and anyone else with an iota of sense. I can't completely discount it, but it is highly unlikely. I'd dig out some references, but you wouldn't read them anyway.
3) Who's to say that the Milky Way isnt 10% populated (1 habited planetary body per solar system)? Again, me. Most solar systems are unable support a habitable planet. Prove me wrong, but I'm only basing this on all the science I've ever seen.
Now to flamebait back... I bet you voted Bush.
by Terry Bisson
http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html
That's assuming there isn't many alien species out there, if there are billions of species of aliens, the odds seem a bit different then.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that evolving,
Revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second,
So it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
It's 100,000 light years side to side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick,
But out by us it's just 3,000 light years wide.
We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point,
We go around every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
In this amazing and expanding universe...
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Yes. He did
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I for one welcome our 250 billion year old space exploring overlords.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
"we should expect alien technology to be roughly the same as ours, give or take a century or so"
Not really.
You need to allow for the mass extinctions in the Earth's past.
If the mass extinction 250 million years ago (Permian-Triassic) had not occurred then intelligent life may have evolved on this planet over 200 million years ago.
It would be quite possible for an alien race to be hundreds of millions of years more advanced than us just due to luck.
It might take a million replications for that particular error to hit, but it'd happen eventually.
And that, in a nutshell, is why creationism can be believed by otherwise intelligent people.
Of course it wont take a million replications. You probably know that. Maybe a trillion would be closer to the mark. Evolution is slow, so slow that we can't really conceive of how slow that is. Any attempt at imagining it usually winds up thinking about much much shorter time-frames, and in those time-frames things simply wouldn't happen like that unless they had a helping hand.
As to those probes. How does it take for a million self-replicating probes to become a trillion. People tend to get that one wrong too. Got a chessboard and some rice?
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolut
http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/evol/lizard.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolv
Evolution proceeds at different rates depending on the environment. If a population of long, medium and short tailed monkeys has all of the long tailed ones killed in a generation, then the species has evolved in that one generation... 5 years? The genes for long tails have gone.
Random mutations now... Well that depends on just how good the copying process is, but no matter how good it is, it isn't perfect. There's no such thing as perfection in the real world so errors are going to appear and accumulate in offspring. As to those probes. How does it take for a million self-replicating probes to become a trillion. Depends how many offspring each generation have on average, the time between generations and available resources.... And if mutated machines predate on one another... No reason to believe they wouldn't.
Deleted
This Danish dude is going to like totally piss off the Elder Gods if he doesn't shut up
Other civilizations will explore the universe for live at the speed of light (as we do). Any civilization within 3.8 billion light years with a large enough telescope knows of life here! Some might say the telescope would have to be size of their host planet, EXACTLY! Look up interferometry. Spectroscopy is what we use to determine (quite easily) the compounds in the atmospheres of extraterrestrial bodies: the 7 other planets, the sun, and by 2020 large extra-solar planets 3-4 times the size of Jupiter that are close to us. For about the last 3.8 billion years give or take .2 billion years, bacteria and other primitive organisms have been creating oxygen. Light from the sun is reflected through our atmosphere, obscuring certain wavelengths of light. The light reflected from the earth with the first traces of elevated oxygen is now 3.8 billion light years from earth. Commonly accepted estimates for the size of the universe are about 11 billion light years. So almost half of universe has the ability to know of our existence! A sphere with a radius of 3.8 billion light years is enormous!
An extremely low estimate of the abundance of life in the universe (one civilization per galaxy) would equate to about 30-50 billion civilizations that fall within the spherical detection zone with a radius of 3.8 BLY.
Civilizations within 100 light years can tell we have gone through an industrial revolution by light wavelengths obscured by CO2.
Physical probes??!! Pfffffft.
What if they're so alien or advanced to us that we don't qualify as intelligent life forms? Even if they found us, would they recognize out planet as habitable enough to support their version of life? :)
It depends on how probable you believe life existing elsewhere is. I believe that extraterrestrial life existing is quite probable given the size of the universe (though perhaps it is less probable in a single galaxy) and, given enough chances, civilizations should almost certainly exist that are more advanced than ours, even if the majority of civilizations are not. The challenge, then, is finding the civilizations in this vast universe. As the article points out, this is a formidable challenge. However, civilizations near our level should be easier to find because they manipulate large amounts of energy in ways that we may be able to detect (radio emissions, spacecraft, etc). Less advanced civilizations may not be there yet and more advanced civilizations may have moved on to entirely new technologies.
To put it in probabilistic terms, the probability of finding a civilization may be very small, but the conditional probability of finding one near our level given that we find one at all is probably much higher.
Until we find what waits on Europa, how can we know?
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. http://www.palantir.net/2001/tma1/wav/cantdo.wav
Mr. Rasmus Bjoerk either tried to reinvent the wheel or stole the idea from Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy. Baxter's gave one of the best plausible colonization scenerios in his books, I recommend them to any avid Sci-Fi reader who doesn't know Baxter yet (he's a physicist and an engineer and he surely knows his stuff). Whatever Bjoerk said, it's already been said, and in better words, by Baxter.
Since the guy assumes so much about colonization being so similar to human needs/wants I'd have a question for him. If his theory is right, why we as humans haven't sent probes yet to our closest stars? (Voyager I and II don't really count because they were sent just "out there" with no actual destination). How about sending probes to the Barnard star system or Proxima/Alpha Centauri, Vega, etc.? Maybe another civilization doesn't care just as much.
I've never understood how some can dismiss faith in God as foolish while holding on steadfastly to a belief in 'little green men'. At least what I hold faith in (God) has taken the effort to get in touch with us here on Earth.
Look, just because WE haven't figured out how to travel faster than light doesn't mean it's impossible, or that we never will. FTL travel would greatly reduce the time required to explore over vast distances. I think it's fair to say, though, that if we ARE being visited, the extraterrestrials would almost have to have discovered a way to beat "the speed limit."
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
If it weren't for the DNA raining down on us, we'd still be a "dead" planet. We have already been 'colonized'. See the wikpd entry for Panspermia.
The existence of amino acids in interstellar space has already been established. See the article.
Also note Terence McKenna's theory of the "magic mushrooms from outer space" that colonized Earth. See this article. The relevant quote:
My point is merely that the universe is an open system and we may have already been "colonized", not once but several times. What would be a more logical way of colonizing the galaxy than to seed it with items that self-assemble into 'life' under the correct conditions? We simply don't recognize the fact with our tiny monkey brains yet -- we are still stuck in the 'projection of uniqueness' -- (i.e the theory that such a wonderful thing as the emergence of self-aware consciousness can only happen once) -- state. Little do we know.DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
As a former genetics students working with bacteria. I can safely say evolution is fast. The problem is peoples intuition have troubles with things beyond or below our normal scales of size and multitude. The real problem is creationists tend to have a vanishngly small ability to grasps things outside of their immediate enviroment and size factor, not evolution "supporters" ability to imagine how slow evolution is. Take 1/1 million multiple by a million units = hightly likely.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
The diameter of the galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across. Fastest probes today travel 80000km/hr or 0.00007c, so that adds up to 1.3 billion years.
At 0.1c, it would take 1 million years
Not sure where the need for a computer simulation is.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Alien intelligent life may exist out there, but there are many factors to take into consideration:
1) aliens have found us, but we can not find them, because they are very advanced and know very well how to hide.
2) aliens have found us, but we can not find them, because we can not recognize what we see.
3) aliens have found us, but we can not find them, because we do not have the tools to observe them, even though they do not hide.
4) aliens have found us, considered us unimportant, went on to the next system.
5) aliens have found us, but some sort of prime directive forbids them from first contact until we discover advanced spaceflight.
6) aliens have not found us, because they have not yet reached this part of the galaxy.
7) aliens have not found us, because civilisations tent to destroy themselves when they reach a critical level of technology.
Perhaps there are more factors...the real conclusion is that the absence of 'first contact' is no proof for absence of alien intelligent life outside of our solar system. We are simply too primitive to tell what is happening.
m. A spaceship powered by the weird mathematics encountered in Italian restaurents.
n. The former Mars moon Phobos, turned into a giant ship complete with three artificial intel########<Spurious Interrupt - Breach Disabled> <Further Access Denied>
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I always thought the Christian God would be more like someone outside a simulation of the Universe rather than being part of it. Omniscience, omnipotence and being able to trigger the big bang aren't really possible for someone inside the Universe, but they are trivially easy if for someone running a matrix style simulation of the universe outside the universe.
That said, all the usual objections to Solipsism apply to this. It seems like you would need proof from lots of different sources that our reality is not the outermost one before you started to take that sort of idea seriously. And you have to wonder if someone running a simulation would bother to intervene as opposed to nuking the simulation and restarting with different parameters.
But if you think of science as asymptotically approaching the absolute Truth, discovering newer, more accurate theories could be considered analogous to finding new layers to reality. E.g. a grand unified theory would presumably contain relativity and quantum mechanics as approximations but would explain more than either of them. It would be the underlying mechanism in a sense that drives both of them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In all of those instances the "collective" cannot convey information faster than the speed of light.
See, it's all about information propagation. And the top speed for that is c.
So unless you manipulate space-time with exotic matter or something similar you cannot travel faster than c.
And even then it is dubious.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Who says travelling faster than light will ever be possible? We've never observed anything doing so, and we have some reasonably good theory that suggests that it's impossible.
I've never been much for replacing good arguments, logic, and independent thinking with quotes from famous people, but here goes:"Things are only impossible until they're not."
Jean-Luc Picard, 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's first law
And please refrain from calling me out for attempting to refute your argument by quoting Star Trek and a science fiction writer. Picard and Clarke have a certain power around slashdot, and are to be considered honorary scientists among nerds.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
And my best argument against the Our Gov't Is In Contact With Aliens/Has Captured UFOs is a complex one: let's ignore the folks who think that microwave ovens are UFO tech; we *know* where every bit of technology came from, and can trace back the scientific research behind it a hundred and fifty years, at least. If any of the contact/capture had been true, there would have been *something* that came literally out of nowhere, that we couldn't see where it came from.
mark "and would *you* want to contact us, with Bush 'in charge'?"
"Beam us up, Scotty, there's *no* intelligent life here."
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
That's the illusion of faster than light motion and it's entirely worthless. It's just like if you go outside and wave a laser pointer up in the sky. Somewhere out there is a red dot that looks like it's moving at ludicrous speed, but nothing really is in a meaningful sense.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Well there are two parts to evolution. Generating diversity and reducing diversity. Selection pressure can reduce the diversity extremely quickly. That's the fast part.
I just skimmed the lizard article so I'm not sure of the changes spotted in that example but most examples of rapid evolution I have seen are simply changing the prominence of different parts of the existing diversity.
In the timeline of life on earth all breeds of dogs turned up in a blink of an eye. While the changes look extreme, I'm not sure if there is anything at all that goes beyond simple scaling of existing features and changing of pigments. That's the easy stuff.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
So how long did it take for bacteria to go multicellular (actual questions, I don't knnw). How many generations did that take? To properly calculate how many tries it took you should probably count all of the direct clones of anything along the successful branch.
Is that what you would call a big number?
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
So how long did it take for bacteria to go multicellular (actual questions, I don't knnw). How many generations did that take? To properly calculate how many tries it took you should probably count all of the direct clones of anything along the successful branch.
Is that what you would call a big number?
I'm not exactly sure what your asking. A multi cellular change can happen fairly quickly. A large predatory bacteria engulfs but does not fully digest a prey and we now have a pseudo multicellular organism. Or we have a bacteria that developes a outer shell and the outer shell grows into other bacteria of the same type. (diatoms) ect.. The calculation of how likely that is and how many generaltions are all probability. In bacteria, if it happens once, thats enough. So like the lottery it may take only 1 try might tak 49 choose 6 tries. For things like trying to induce the point mutation for a change in the structure of cell walls that allow bacteria to ignore certain anti-biotics. It's about 1/1,000,000 (really rough figure). Basically it often occurs once every culture disk we used and tested; and that bacteria strain would then be the only survivor. So basically a single generation on a standard petri dish. The rate of mutation in animals is pretty finite. Anythign thats not instantly fatal or inhibits reproduction egts passed on. Any specific mutation is unlikely but we are very veyr highly likely to mutate. So every person carry some set of minor mutation.
I think your trying to lead into the blind watch maker fallacy. Just to let you know there is no end point of desired features. It's just code mutations that lead to altered enzymes/protiens ect... They may have phenotipic effects. These are then selected for. We all have altered code. depending on what it is, that determins if we show the mutation.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."