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Fermi Paradox Predicting Humankind's Future?
An anonymous reader writes "The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. The Space Review has an article on how the Fermi paradox can be applied to human civilization. It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable.
Sure- you *might* be able to theoretically build a ship that could go further but all politics is local. Look at our politics- could we gather the will to build a 10 trillion dollar multi-generation star ship?
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources, some kind of self destruction, or being wiped out by an external event.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Remaining on Earth is the same as becoming extinct, the sun won't last forever. The choices should be: colonize or die, and never quit colonizing.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
"Remain on Earth" and "become extinct" are not distinct choices. As Heinlein and numerous others have put it, the Earth is too small and fragile a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in.
It's not so much a matter of "if" but of "when". Ask the dinosaurs.
-- Alastair
I think that boils down to two choices:
Colonize the galaxy, or remain on Earth and become extinct.
Of course, at the end of the Universe we'll still become extinct, unless we manage to figure out how to survive it. We still got a few billion years, though.
I, for one, welcome our new paradoxical overlords.
Sometimes, you can, you go to hell for the rest of your life! That's a true thing.
If spacefaring civilizations exist, they should have colonized the galaxy by now.
Earth is a spacefaring civilization.
Earth hasn't colonized the galaxy by now.
Ergo, Earth doesn't exist.
So say we all.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
1. Never leave Earth and become extinct very soon. 2. Never leave the solar system and become extinct somewhat later. 3. Never leave the galaxy and become extinct quite a bit later. 4. Never leave the universe and be the last to become extinct.
and the earth is flat...
Colonizing anywhere other than earth is such an expensive endevour, that I suspect natural human pervisity will lead us to some 4th solution.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
to be quite honest, we're too small minded to colonise the galaxy. we use our resources to make trivial things that amuse us for a short period of time (ipod, iphone, etc) rather than doing useful things (cure diseases, etc). we need to cast ourselves together and towards a goal of the improvement of humankind, live together yaddy yadda, and so on and so forth. we're going to go extinct and this is me being optimistic!
Any intelligence advanced enough to reach Earth from another star system (or dimension?) would easily be able to disguise their presence so we couldn't see them but they could still study us. Just because aliens might exist doesn't mean they'd want to interact with us - thats taking a very human centred view of their motives. For all we know they could view us as barely above pond life in the scale of celestial intelligences and so interaction with us for them would be like us trying to have an interesting and meaningful conversation with an insect - a waste of time and effort.
There's a reason they were able to advance that far in the first place, and I doubt it was Probe Spamming or Galactic Domination.
> colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct Profound stuff. I've also heard it said that if P is a proposition then either P is true or P is false. But I've never been one to make such sweeping claims myself.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It says that...humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
Well duh! You figure that out all by your self, "Einstein"?
That's like saying I have a choice between staying alive or killing myself.
Or better yet it's like this screen capture from CNN.
All too often we get mesmerized by human "thinkers" without realising that once you cut through all the high-falutin rhetoric, they're just talking shit.
You're using her as bait, Master!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Homo sapiens have only been around for 200,000 years.
Homo erectus is already extinct, as is every near precursor.
Homo sapiens will be extinct no matter what we do
No species lasts forever. They usually overspecialize into extinction.
In other words, it has taken primates some-odd half a million years to evolve into humans capable of inventing devices that can decipher energy waves from space. It has taken the Earth some 200 million years (from early life to humans) to evolve life on this scale. Assuming other planets have roughly the same time scale, we can only assume those planets inside a 200 (give or take a 100) million lightyear radius contains no life.
The paradox with the paradox is as follows: Earth contains intelligent life. Earth has not colonized the galaxy. Earth's evidence in space only reaches back into the 1930s when the very first signals were sent into space.
For what I consider a much better treatment of this topic, see: The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?
This stuff is a big deal, and the Great Filter paper actually manages to draw some useful concrete conclusions from the question, or at least useful concrete questions.
Also related, albeit a little more tangentially, is "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?". "We're in a simulation and there are no extraterrestrials in the simulation" must be considered one of the leading possible answers. (I'm not advocating it either way, I don't have an answer. Nor do I consider this post anywhere near a complete list, just some relevant pointers.)
But they all came up with their own version of the Fermi Paradox, talked about it and decided that there wasn't anything out in space worth colonizing.
What if other beings are on a similar technological timeline as ours? How could we have colonized the galaxy since our space exploration has begun? Seems kind of idiotic as to be used as proof that we are the only beings in the universe... This kind of reminds me of a manager who thinks a perfect computer system is easy to develop and doubts you when you tell her/him that it will take actual time to design/implement/test/deploy/maintain...
Well, what's the use of wondering about so far into the future? I feel too depressed reading about it. Oh no, i'd rather be upset when they say that all crytography algorithms will be cracked within 10 million years, and someone will crack my password and start posting with my uber-low slashdot UID (remember folks, we are talking about ~1000000 AD here).
Webb's 50th solution is the one that he believes is the most likely. Unfortunately for extraterrestrial enthusiasts, the solution is depressingly pessimistic: "...the only resolution of the Fermi paradox that makes sense to me--is that we are alone." Webb's preferred solution is highly controversial, but it satisfies Ockham's razor; out of all the Fermi paradox explanations, it is the simplest one. On the other hand, the solution is only as good as the evidence it is based on. New evidence could lead to a different solution to the paradox.
Fermi's Paradox isn't really a paradox, it's a question: "Where are they?" One possible answer is, "They don't exist." It seems probable that as we explore the galaxy we will find life everywhere, and intelligence nowhere.
The evidence for this is very strong. For one, there is the fact that we see no evidence for them at all. For two, life on Earth shows us that the kind of intelligence that builds spacecraft is extremely unlikely to evolve.
Evolution routinely produces some complicated solutions to common problems over and over again. The eye has (probably) evolved many, many times. Wings have certainly done so, as have fins. Everything we know about natural history on Earth tells us that evolution by variation and natural selection will produce the same solution to the same problem with very high reliability. This is even true of things like extra vertebra in the necks of some Central American lizard: there are a couple of species that have this feature, and previously they were thought to have a recent common ancestor. Gene sequencing shows this is not the case--it is merely a result of common evolutionary pressures on similar forms having similar results.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, seems to be something of an evolutionary fluke. Our ancestors were a marginal species of mediocre tool users for hundreds of thousands of years before we suddenly started on our current course about fifty thousand years ago, with the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. If intelligence was even just ten times harder to evolve than eyes and wings, it would have occurred more than once in the entire history of the Earth.
Until someone comes up with a compelling account as to why human-style (i.e. machine-building, empire-building, world-colonizing) intelligence should be anything other than incredibly rare, there really isn't any other reasonable answer to Fermi's Question.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct. - I disagree. There are many many more choices than that. For example a more attainable goal maybe to colonize you entire solar system without ever leaving it for the lack of sufficient energy sources to sustain a thousand year inter-solar space travel. Another possibility is to build a ringworld or a Dyson Sphere of some sort. This obviously does not fall into either of the formerly presented categories. It maybe also possible to actually not leave the Earth, but travel on it towards other solar systems (far fetched, but probably not impossible given enough time,) however travelling on a planet without a companian star would require the people to dig into the planet I suppose and never go outside into the frozen atmosphere.
It may not be feasible and/or necessary to travel outside of your solar system to preserve the species, there is plenty of space here, around our sun.
Of-course our sun will go Nova in about 5 billion years and will turn into a white dwarf, which will radiate heat and light for another trillion years probably. There is no reason to leave this solar system, we can just move away from the sun before it goes Nova and then move back closer to it.
You can't handle the truth.
...we'll still be human. The problem isn't where we are, it's what we are. Don't change that and there's always the possibility we'll amuse ourselves to death.
All it boils down to is "either we have overestimated how many advanced civilizations ought to exist out there, or we are rubbish at looking for them." Hmmm well I'm a frickin genius so I'll tackle this one no prob: looking for something that is single-digit lightyears away at best (forget about the 'at worst' because we'll be kinda burned away by then by the sun and all) means you have a LOT of time-lag between any sort of response, even if you do get it, and that's assuming you sent it in the right direction to begin with. So, yes we are rubbish at looking for them, and we can't help it because light speed is the best we can do and the sky is big. Given we don't know how to efficiently locate other civilizations, there's no way to tell whether we're off on how many ought to exist. So the paradox is crap. As far as saying how advanced they ought to be, that's just childish speculation. Colonizing a galaxy would require something that goes well beyond our current grasp of physics given the resources and time scale involved. Sure, it does seem like we have a long way to go in terms of our understanding of the universe, but to say that with enough of an understanding we'll be all over the galaxy is REALLY optimistic.
I like basketball!!1!
"The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now"
Why can't there be loads of civilizations in similar states to our own, why *MUST* they be so advance that they would be capable of colonising the entire galaxy by now. Even if a civilization was more advance than us who is to say that they are capable of interstella travel. Dosn't this assume some kind of startrek technology is possible? What if its not. So a civilization builds an ark or two to escape a dieing solarsystem and moves to another, thats not talking over the entire galaxy is it?
If life is anything like our own, any sufficiently advanced civilization will have had plenty of chances to nuke themseves before they even got past their local moon.
There are so many things wrong with that logic!
Some slashdotters decried the move and speculated that Venture capital for the firms currently engaged in space exploration will dry up immediately. European Union created a standard Open Protocol for Space Exploration. Microsoft submitted a competing standard as the standard. Its spokesman said "There should be lots of competing standards. More the merrier."
Meanwhile one lone guy who wrote a "In Soviet Russia the Space explores you" got modded down as "so last century".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The sun is about 4.5 billion years old, and has a lifespan as a main sequence star of about 10 billion years. I hardly think that this paper, no matter how eloquent, is going to affect the course of humanity's decisions in the next few billion years.
OMFG - WE'VE ONLY GOT 5.5 BILLION YEARS LEFT! COLONIZE NOW OR DIE!
we're too small minded to colonise the galaxy
We weren't too small minded to risk lives hiking over mountain ranges or floating in very-likely-to-sink boats across open ocean to other continents, remember? Primitive Asians floating across the Pacific to populate South America or hoofing it in across the northern straights were taking on something at least as dicey as we currently see activities in space. Villages wiped each other out, disease killed off whole tribes - all of the stuff that people say would keep us from colonizing elsewhere. Sure, some of those efforts would fail - just as they have for tens of thousands of years. But some will succeed, too.
we use our resources to make trivial things that amuse us for a short period of time (ipod, iphone, etc)
That's because we evolved from, and still are short-lived primates. Our brains were wired to deal with much more short-term issues. Planning through the coming weather change is about as far as we ever needed to go, mentally. Only some people have the wiring to do big picture stuff... and guess what: they tend to get jobs doing big picture stuff. As for trivial things like iPods: you'd rather have a society with somewhat better antibiotics, but completely absent all of the things that make life a pleasure? The iPod is just a newer take on cave painting and tribal dancing. The fact that we evolved into creatures that put handprints on walls and invent group songs to sing doesn't mean we can't also do things like invent solar cells, fly transplant organs through the air to another city where they're needed, or manage to live past 25. Being productive, inventive, and joyous are not mutually exclusive - they're interdependent.
rather than doing useful things (cure diseases, etc).
I'm sorry to hear that you died of Polio. Or was it Smallpox? Or maybe spoiled food because we haven't invented refridgeration yet. Anyway, sorry you died.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wasn't it recently published that it could take billions of years to effectively colonize the galaxy?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Which would certainly be nice if we would have the technology to move a planet. What if Venus or Mercury would still be too hot to live on? At the point at which this occurs, we should have the technology to make artificial planets anyway. Maybe even artificial suns?
For some reason, they don't take orders from somebody on Slashdot with a 900k+ user ID.
a) We exist
b) We are a civilization
c) We have not colonized the universe
d) If a), b), and c) are true for one civilization, it might be true for any number of civilizations
Therefore, it just may be that, the galaxy is so overwhelmingly large that the time for any one civilization to expand enought to encounter another distinct civilization is arbitrarily long.
Then again the SA article was full of fluff so perhaps I missed an important detail?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I find it arrogant to think that any technologically advanced civilization MUST colonize the galaxy. What? Do they have nothing but greedy capitalists running their space colonization program?
/have blanket. willing to travel
It would be that of typical human behavior to colonize the entire galaxy if we had the technological means. I suppose, and hope, that those that can, do and show the proper restraint when it comes to space inhabitation and colonization. I also hope that they steer clear of those lesser civilizations who have yet to overcome their own distinct social problems.
***WARNING***
The Interjection of Extra-Terrestrial Life, and sufficiently advanced technologies onto the present-day societies, and population of Earth is a very, very BAD IDEA!!!!!!!!!!
or the Stargate at NORAD
Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction 176 years ago, the first radio was patented by William Henry Ward only 135 years ago. (cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio)
If other intelligent life is out there and looking for us, from between 135 and 176 light years away, they're just now finding us, or are just about to. If they're closer, perhaps they haven't developed the same level of technology we have (or hadn't by the time we did), thus why we haven't found them, either. Or maybe they're just not looking.
If they're more than 176 light years away from us and developed at about the same rate we did, we couldn't possibly have found them yet, signals from their transmissions haven't reached us; likewise for them finding us.
Remember, it's only the general idea they they are more advanced than us, if they exist; it's not a fact. They could be just as advanced as we are or they could be far less advanced than us.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I'd wager that one more informed than I could argue that some elephants have higher intelligence potential than some humans. Whales too, perhaps? The issue is, thier physical form doesnt allow them to -DO- anything WITH that intelligence ... we got lucky with our opposable thumbs ....
The alternate solution is published in the British Journal of Interplanetary Science and states that the galaxy sure may be teeming with life and that "they" may already be in the neighbourhood. Check it out here: http://www.ufoskeptic.org/JBIS.pdf
Our view from Earth is that we can see one planet in the galaxy that can support life as we know it - Earth - and it has life on it.
So from our perspective, it sure looks like it's been colonized. And therefore it's not unreasonable to assume that extraterrestrial civilizations exist.
Many humans would say we have colonized the entire Earth, and yet there are many critters in many crevices who don't know we exist.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
The doomsday argument says that if we are going to eventually spread out and colonize the universe, future human population will be enormously larger than today, perhaps billions or trillions of times larger. In that case the chance that we as random humans would find ourselves existing today at such an infinitesimally early stage of human progress is virtually nil. Whereas if this is as big as human population will get, and we don't live too much longer, it makes perfect sense for us to be alive today. Given the evidence, then, we can reject the colonize-the-universe scenario with long odds.
Well, part of it anyway. At first I thought it was one of those "Discovery Channel" specials
boy....I could not have been more wrong....all I'm going to say is, it's really important to filter your cable channels these days....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Pulitzer here I come!
Fermi never said anything about civilizations colonizing the entire galaxy. Story submitter should have read the wiki article he/she included as a link.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Or we can go live with the Machine Elves!
The Fermi paradox can be strengthened if we look at proposals for stellar engineering. Many futurists argue that the logical end state for a stellar civilization is to surround the star with solar collectors and capture all that energy which is otherwise wasted. This will not only give the civilization more resources to work with but it is arguably environmentally protective as otherwise that lost energy can never be reclaimed.
Extrapolating to an interstellar civilization, we would expect to see an expanding sphere of stars which go dark and radiate only in the far infrared. In time, entire galaxies would be transformed like this, then clusters of galaxies. We should eventually see roughly spherical voids in space which are empty of visible light galaxies and contain only mysterious far-infrared galaxies. This would be the signature of an interstellar civilization.
Unfortunately, no such astronomical phenomena exist. There are no far-infrared galaxies. There are voids, but they show no gravitational or infrared signs of containing encapsulated galaxies.
Hence it seems that not only are the aliens not here, they're not out there either. The scope of the Fermi paradox is expanded enormously. It appears that there are no mature interstellar civilization in our past light cone, which encompasses a far larger region than just our galaxy.
how difficult is it to look at that statement and realize how wrong it is?
"The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy."
Whether that statement is an accurate summarization of the Fermi paradox isn't even under consideration. It's logically flawed.
Why limit it to extraterrestrial civilizations? (in other words, we exist; why shouldn't WE have colonized the entire galaxy by now?)
Why should one of them have colonized the entire galaxy by now? (And who's to say they didn't seed our planet, as many theories hold?)
When did lack of evidence become proof of absence?
What makes you think we're so intelligent, anyway? If spacefaring extraterrestrial civilizations exist and we haven't found them yet, who would you judge to be the more intelligent?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
If you are christian, you will remain on earth (until you die)...
If you are not Muslim, you will become extinct....
If you are pro science (or a geek like the rest that read this) you will want to colonize the galaxy....
So we can be all three?
The depressing version: any civilization that develops energy sources big enough to power interstellar travel also has the ability to blow itself up. Over time, the odds of some nut getting hold of the capability to do so is high.
We're really lucky that enriching uranium is a big, expensive operation. We're unlucky in that it's getting much cheaper.
We're towards the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. If you were looking for colonies, wouldn't you go towards the center where there are more stars and possibly more inhabitable planets?
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
I would say to think that humans are the only intelligent life form in the galaxy is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever. I mean, we barely know what lives in our oceans beyond a mile or two down, and I would consider most of those creatures to be "alien" life forms, many of which are cepholopods with extraordinary abilities for communication, reasoning, and some show some real intelligence.
To say that we are the 1 freak accident in the realm of infinite space, is simply outlandish.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
Yes, if ONLY there was some sort of phenomenon that science had been struggling to explain that fit those exact criteria...something we can't see that has mass, and judging by gravitational estimates, there is a lot of it.
If ONLY there was SOMETHING like that...
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Clearly, then, humankind has the right, nay the obligation to expand throughout the universe.
We should terraform any planets that are not already Earthlike, use the energy of however many stars it takes to achieve our goals, and find some black hole into which to pitch any planets that become inconveniently polluted.
Any semi-intelligent life we encounter along the way will obviously be inferior, since it has not colonized the universe first. If it gets in our way (or even if it doesn't) we should trample it under our jackboots, but only if necessary. Whenever possible we should altruistically force them to accept the inestimable benefits of the English language, democracy, and McDonald's hamburgers.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
We won't "run out of resources". Sunlight produces all the resources we need, and the sun won't stop shining for many billion years.
Just to toss a Buddhist mindset into things, why are we assuming future humans (or highly advanced aliens) even occupy "space" as we call it? There could be trillions of sentient races in the universe ... but none of them still occupy the universe as we observe it with our cute little telescopes and sensors arrays and particle accelerators.
They've moved on, and unless we kill ourselves off in the coming centuries maybe we will too. Humans like to get all puffed up with pride at the things we've figured out through science, but there is a very real possibility that that universe is nothing like we believe it to be. As we mature we'll keep learning.
This leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that the presence of microbial life on Mars increases the probability that we're probably doomed soon, since if there's microbial life on Mars then the formation of microbial life must not have been one of the very improbable pieces of luck in our past.
I'm sure we'll bring democracy to the Galaxy soon. We'll be up on Mars soon, after all. Then...
Unfortunately, no such astronomical phenomena exist. There are no far-infrared galaxies. There are voids, but they show no gravitational or infrared signs of containing encapsulated galaxies.
That statement:
1) Assumes that you've actually looked everywhere within the visible universe (visible to US), and that you've done so with adequate sensitivity. And that such spot is not, by bad coincidence, on the other side of some galaxy or other obscuring structure.
2) Assumes that your premise is even correct. Do you really think that an advanced civilization would trap all/i of that energy, or just much as would be useful - which would probably be a very small percentage of the star's overall output.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Several SciFi stories, and a great number of human religions, forward the idea that stars are not just balls of gas, but sentient beings.
Stars have energy, changing patterns of heat/light, etc - and everything made of matter is a child made of star dust.
Little humans running around on planets just don't rate worth speaking to.
After all, they are made of meat!
"The surest sign there's intelligent life in the galaxy is that they haven't tried to contact us."
Colonise the Galaxy.
Great, first thing you need to do is grab yourself a realistic concept of scale and numbers. You mind cannot hold or comprehend the idea of just how BIG the galaxy is, in both terms of distance / time and number of objects.
By the time you spread far enough to be human eye visible on a football stadium sided holographic display of the entire galaxy, homo sapien has evolved into something that is no longer homo sapien, nor homo habilis / Neanderthal / cro magnon etc
If you could travel at relativistic speeds, eg 0.999 light, it would still take you 100,000 years to cross, not counting acceleration time, and the same time again to send a message back to earth.
2/ Remain on Earth
Just sit here and do nothing, still won't stop random events like the mexico gulf impact, or darwinian evolution, so even if we sit here and do nothing, and even assuming we aren't, aided by scientific meddling, already due the next increment in human evolution, there aren't going to be any humans left as we know them in 100,000 years, at the outside, maybe as little as 5,000 years just due to evolution alone.
3/ Become extinct
Well, we will anyway, dinosaurs become chickens and birds, homo sapiens is just DNA's current best way of making more DNA, if it can drive us off planet to spread the DNA further and wider DNA wins again.
Human extinction is a certainty, and within a time span that might be as short as my lifetime due to a catastrophic event, or a time span that I can envisage in my head, say 100k years at the outside, 5000 generations, just due to evolutionary processes.
A more intelligent question would be will there be any DNA in the distant future that has me as its ancestor?
4/ The whole stupid paradox thing itself.
Only a hairless monkey can dream up a language that makes idiotic constructs such as these, or "the next thing I say is true, the last thing I said is a lie" and waste any time thinking about them.
Stupid, even more stupid to think that anything so stupid could remain unchanged long enough to colonise a galaxy.
Space is already known to be full of the building blocks of life, amino acids etc, earth is regularly doused in this material, only a stupid and arrogant naked ape could believe he was the nadir of perfection and destined to inherit the universe.
Bet your ass the Neanderthals had a god complex too, and no doubt god made them in his image too.
I'll lay odds the next iteration who look upon us as we look upon Neanderthals will be just as dumb and believe god made them in his image too.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
In the 1970's the U.S. landed on the moon. At that time there were futurists that predicted we would be on Mars by 2000. Where are we today? The Apollo program was defunded and the money spent on the war on poverty, the Space Shuttle was funded at such low levels it became a piece of junk and the Mars proposals by President Bush are being resisted by every special interest group wanting that money to be spent on their own pet project. China is porposing a Mars mission, but it is not clear if they will fare any better than the Soviet Union did (remember they gave up the effort after the US moon landing although it is not clear why).
It is no wonder we havn't seen alien sentient species. If they have the intelegence and drive to evolve advanced technology, then they are probabily just as agressive and selfish as humans. Wars and the desire to have their goverments care for thier every need will have defunded any space exploration.
The speed of light limitation is an obvious example of radio waves not being the best imaginable medium for interstellar communications. Special relativity and all that is our current model of the limits of information propagation but given our history it would be presumptuous that no replacement model will come along in due time.
The Fermi paradox goes something like this: Indian #1: We use smoke signals for communication - it's the best thing we can think of.
Indian #2: Right.
Indian #1: It is reasonable to assume that other people would use the same technology.
Indian #2: Right.
Indian #1: We have not observed any smoke signals from the neighbouring mountains. If there were a lot of other people in the world, we'd be seeing smoke signals all over the place.
Indian #2: Ergo there are not a lot of other people in the world.
Indian #1: Right.
How do you know we aren't a colony?
People tend to look at these issues from the wrong perspective. They look at them from the perspective of what is best for "The Species" and not from the perspective of the people and organizations that will be making the actual decisions.
For an organization on Earth, whether it's a government, private society, or corporation, what is the benefit of colonizing another solar system? The distances mean that the organization will not control the colony. The energy cost and travel time mean there won't be trade of any material goods back and forth between different solar systems. After all, the energy cost of transporting materials from another star system within a human lifetime approach that of the total energy content of the material (E=mc^2 and all that). It will take centuries before any colony is of sufficent size and sophistication to contribute culturally or scientifically back to the Earth. So why would any organization undertake the colonization of another solar system?
For an individual, why would they personally participate in the colonization of another solar system? A society which could expend the resources to colonize another solar system, is obviously a rich and technically capable one. An individual who could make a contribution as part of a colonization effort is clearly smart and capable. So why would a smart and capable member of a wealthy society choose to become a member of a small colony struggling to survive on some distant world? Or even worse condemn themselves and their descendents to be trapped on a generational starship? I find it difficult to imagine a society which has the resources to colonize another solar system and yet provides so little opportunity to it's most capable members, that it would make sense for someone to participate in colonization.
People want to draw analogies from previous eras of exploration and colonization without understanding the fundamental differences between then and now. The European societies which went out and colonized the world, were ones where wealth was almost exclusively derived from agriculture and extraction of raw materials. The economic opportunities of most people were extremely limited and yet given land they could be almost self-sufficent. A few hundred people in a colony could provide most material goods the average person could expect to have. The transportation costs were low enough that within a few years, a profit could be made colonizing another continent based on the trade of raw materials. Compare that to the colonization of another planet. The up-front costs will be enormous. The possibility of profit, nearly zero. For the settlers, colonization would mean an enormous sacrifice in their living standard and for their descendents.
Colonization of other solar systems doesn't make sense on a purely rational level for either individuals or organizations. Of course neither organizations or people are always rational, so there may very well be colonization driven by ideology or religion, but it's not an inevitability.
Lets go with there being 2 possibilities:
a) Extraterrestrial colonizers don't exist.
b) Extraterrestrial colonizers do exist.
Then we have two choices:
a) No one is in the way, let's spread out from this planet before something makes this place uninhabitable
b) There are others out there, lets get a chunk of the universe for ourselves before we are out competed for it and and something makes earth uninhabitable.
If there are Extraterrestrials out there slowly colonizing their way towards us, we need to be in a position to do unto them before they do like wise. I find it hard to imagine anything like the Trek Federation forming. Equal dealings like that can only happen between equals, just look at human history. Any time a more advanced civilization meets a lesser, it is squashed. Any one that is out there will be just like us, the offspring of the meanest sneakiest critter that crawled out of the ooze and any peaceful deals will either not last long. We need to get off this rock before we are found unready.
http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/ 2006-12-18-why-go.html
much better than I can explain it.
Time is the factor what will set the faith of human civilisation.
There is no force what can push human civilisation beyond our local system - the Sun and it's satellites.
1) "Accelerando" by Charles Stross: Civs advanced enough to create computing will shortly turn all of their available power (the sun) into shells of 'computronium', each operating off the waste heat of the one inside it. With nearly infinite virtual worlds at your disposal, why go anywhere else?
2) "Berserker" by Fred Saberhagen: There are civs out there, but they're really, really quite to avoid being noticed by fleets of robotic intelligences sworn on eliminating all biological intelligences
3) "Quaarantine" by Greg Egan: We're cut off from the rest of the galaxy until we prove ourselves. What we're seeing of the sky is cleverly only showing what they want us to see.
I'm a bit of a fan of the "We're living in a computer simulation" theory too: since in the future there will be enough computing power to simulate a huge number of realities, the odds are greater that this is a simulation than that it isn't. It would also explain why socks disappear from the dryer, my car keys aren't where I left them, voting irregularities, etc.: Microsoft has got its hand in the kernel somewhere.
Design for Use, not Construction!
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
... it proves mankind is not intelligent (enough?).
Calvin to Hobbes:
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe, is that they haven't contacted us yet"
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Never. And neither will anyone else. For the remainder of the existence of all advanced civilizations everywhere, the entire question will remain conjecture forever. This is not to say there are no other civilizations, because the odds suggest there has got to be. But it means that FOREVER there will NEVER be any contact nor any plausible evidence that such contact is possible. Moreover there will NEVER be any plausible evidence that said other civilizations exist at all.
At best, at the absolute best, Earth will eventually colonize the moon, perhaps Mars in a tiny way and may even make some kind of exploration to the Gas Giants. But that's it, and it will take such a massive effort to do that and will take so long that it won't be practical to do more than a tiny number of times, perhaps no more than once or twice to each planet. If earth is ever destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, at best perhaps 0.01% of humankind will survive elsewhere.
You are, for all practical purposes, forever alone.
Is our planet worth colonizing by life forms that are the most likely to develop the
technology necessary to colonize the galaxy ? Our planet
may be incapable of evolving and/or efficiently supporting forms of life with the levels of complexity that is more
common in the universe. Planets in general may not be the best place for the most complex life forms to colonize
even if planets rather than stars are the points of origin for the more complex forms of life.
Our intellects are physically limited by the time frame and environment
for the evolutionary process from which we emerged. A detail of the final result is that
our science and math are limited to the one dimensional medium of language-based rationality
No doubt, it has served us well but the limitations may be more significant
that we would like and much more significant than we have begun to appreciate in the last century or so.
Communication via temporally sequenced character strings may seem so limiting as to be
pointless to some.
The "Fermi paradox" is about our sense of self importance.
If I were another life form, either on or off of this planet,
how would I deal with creatures of our limitation and arrogance ?
that you couldn't see at a distance to allow yourself to avoid it.
Umm, exactly what credible scientific studies have been made to find evidence of galactic colonisation?
Don't say SETI. SETI's focus is on finding broadcast beacons from ETIs who have not colonised the galaxy; if you've colonised the galaxy you don't need to set up beacons. SETI is not looking for general comm traffic, and the last time I checked, most researchers conceded they couldn't detect such traffic even if they wanted to. The only signals we are likely to find are those specifically broadcast to be easy to find. The failure of SETI to detect such signals supports the idea that the galaxy has been colonised.
Scientists seem to have this conceit that either:
a) they can find the most extraordinary evidence of the most extraordinary scientific discovery in human history - without ever actually having to look for it; and/or
b) if aliens were here, then they would necessarily come and announce themselves to the scientific community, because it is just so important to aliens that our scientists be given irrefutable evidence.
In my opinion, there are three common assumptions about aliens that should never ever be made:
1) They think like we do
2) They are the result of natural evolution
3) They still engage in the quaint habit of living on planets (or even around stars)
When you are talking about a civilisation that may be hundreds of millions of years old, these assumptions are completely unsupportable. Without these assumptions, there is no reason to believe that evidence of galactic colonisation should necessarily fall into our lap. And if it's not going to fall into our lap, and scientists have made no credible effort to find such evidence, then I don't see how anybody can make a conclusion about the Fermi Paradox one way or another.
I think it's far more likely that Earth is another planet's Hell. Alien civilizations haven't visited us for the same reason that you don't spend family vacations in Supermax.
Too bad our collective self-centered arrogance prevents us from considering this.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I had an insight this week, prompted by another slashdot discussion (don't remember about what or by whom) where the idea of the monkeysphere was explained: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.h tml
:-). It's not even important which problem will do us in; probably the first one that rears its head.
Basically, I thought: if there are problems of the type "tragedy of the commons" such as, who's going to pay taxes to solve global problems that are not immediately felt in your own "monkeysphere", and we as average humans don't have the mental capacity to understand that such problems are also OUR problems, then, well, we're not going to make it, independent of which specific "doomsday scenario" becomes imminent.
We're now with enough people on earth that our impact is felt, and if we don't manage to maintain some kind of dynamic equilibrium (on- as well as off-planet), then it's up to the next species to have a go
If we as people elect the kind of leaders that say "it's those other people's fault, there in that other country, outside of your monkeysphere" instead of "you all have to pay more taxes and take these other measures so that we can tackle this important global problem we've identified and reached consensus on", then we get what we deserve.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
The problem with that argument is that nothing is as rare as an unused resource around life.
If they had been here the last few hundred millions years, there would probably be lots of obvious signs of industrial work visible in any telescope.
(Of course, there might be "hunter" aliens and wars, so a low profile is important. If so, the relativistic antimatter rockets should soon arrive...)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
We're all made partially of stars. As for original matter, there was mostly hydrogen, a little deuterium, less helium, and negligible (maybe none) amounts of the rest. For that matter, the early universe was too hot to even allow atoms or nuclei to exist, let alone heavy elements.
All of this stuff in us, excluding the H in our H2O, came out of stars. It took several generations of stars being born and dying to get to the raw materials out there for us. I once read, though I can't quote where, that we are relatively early onto the scene, as far as this galaxy goes. Relatively may be a fuzzy term, but I would interpret it to mean that there won't be intelligent life billions of years older than us.
Just like there's a roughly defined habitable zone around the sun, there's also likely a habitable zone in the galaxy. Too far in and the radiation is too great, too far out and there haven't been enough stellar generations, enough scattering of heavy material, to produce complex life.
IMHO, the Drake Equation is optimistic, and doesn't properly address time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"The size and age of the universe suggest..." which is french for "I kinda think.." and actually doing the math.
I would venture that Fermi was really trying to get people to think about it, rather than assume rigor on his assumptions.
If he's just jousting, or we're stumped on how to look, or the physical limits are more real than certain TV series would suggest, there's no paradox.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Here is why we do not see alien colonizers: Any civilization sufficiently advanced to discover Space Travel evolves its own GW Bush.
colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct
:)
Well, a theory is only good so far as it encompasses all possibilities, since either of them comes true they always can say I told ya so
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Consider how much of gross planetary output
- in natural resources, percentage of human lives, economically measurable quantities, and generated works -
is spent on different activities
- basic survival, culture, self realization, science, exploration, relaxation, education, religion, wasted time, playing of games like politics/war/finance -
and with what percentage of success. We still make little use of plentiful solar energy and the global economic system is based on limited fossil fuels.
Very little goes to science/exploration today. A small bit of that goes to seti/astronomy/rocketry. Very few human beings can build a radio telescope.
=> So it should be *very* easy to accelerate things and shorten the time it takes to view a planet up close, develop new propulsion, investigate our own planets, and even do an astronomical survey of an appreciable part of the sky.
We are most likely wasting undiscovered Einsteins who have grown or failed to grow in terrible economic conditions.
==> Devise and execute individual or group plans that will even a little change the balance of assigned resources and boost physics, astronomy, exploration, etc. The fraction of planetary output assigned to these things is so small that even a little bit ought to help. It is a matter of a little change in priorities.
Slashdot Low User ID Operations Order 001
1. SITUATION: the Fermi Paradox compels us to populate the Galaxy or become extinct.
2. MISSION: NASA will design, test, build, staff, and deploy a fleet of interstellar colony ships for the purposes of populating the galaxy.
3. EXECUTION: This mission will take place in 6 phases:
a. Design a colony ship;
b. Test the colony ship;
c. Build a fleet of colony ships;
d. Staff and populate the colony ships with suitable colonists;
e. Deploy the fleet; and
f. Monitor the colonies and provide support as appropriate.
4. SERVICE SUPPORT
a. Funding: no change.
5. COMMAND AND SIGNALS: no change.
There! Let's see if that works.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Wow. Quite a leap there.
Extraterrestrial life is not prohibited by the Bible. It's not even discussed, AFAIK. If you are such a Biblical scholar that you can point out where/how it's prohibited, please do share the reference!
However, your point that it'd be stupid to think that an intelligent being designed a planet for habitable use and then planted life there is well taken.
Oh wait, your comments about us being seeded by an advanced society and the dinosaurs were killed off by their terraforming were suggesting basically the same thing weren't they.....
Hallowed are the Ori
Do apes in the jungle comprehend that they're already in a world that's been completely conquered and colonized by us humans? I think we'll have the same trouble figuring out who's who outside OUR little jungle.
The conjecture is patently overblown. All that Fermi's conjecture demonstrates is how overwhelmed he was when confronted with his own need to say something about which he had no experience and no evidence.
It could be that soon after a civilization reaches the technology level required for space travel, they reach the technology level that lets them leave the galaxy, and they never bother with all the tedious mucking about required for space travel.
When I said "I see the Fermi paradox as saying that, the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are no other life forms," I mean that I see the Fermi paradox as saying that the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are precious few other possible advanced civilizations. (I don't think he meant there can be none, or that humans are the only ones or something like that, so don't get hung up on it.)
The paradox as stated above is an obvious attempt disregard a very simple idea that provides a non-paradoxical solution: Human civilization is evidence of galactic colonization.
Occam's Razor.
"The Internet is made of cats."
Maybe they stopped by last week, listen a bit,
and decided we're not intelligent life, sending
out a message to the rest of the fleet:
"move along, there is nothing to see here"
So a simple possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that this is an inherent biological mechanism and that in any population that grows to fill its biological niche, birth rates will sooner or later drop until an equilibrium is reached, and this is likely to happen before there is significant pressure to colonize the nearby solar system or stars. While that would leave visits to other planets still reasonably likely, and perhaps even small "local" colonies, without an expanding population and diminishing resources driving prices up, pure economics would dramatically slow down the tempo of any colonization effort to what private individuals could afford and would want to try.
Look at how long Europeans had the capability to reach America before the wave of colonization started, for example. This was a set of cultures that were aggressive and expansionist. Assume the drive to start colonization gets successively less likely as the cost of doing so goes up and the immediate benefit of doing so drops. Once it takes more than a lifetime for economic value to be derived from a colony due to travel time even at light speed, the motivation for pushing for it dramatically reduces for most individuals (look at how hard it is getting people to even sacrifice spending today vs. getting a good pension until they're getting to a certain age, not to consider getting people to sacrifice now for the benefit of their children).
Even with dramatic population growth, a colony would either have to bring economic value (in the form of resources) OR cost little enough in terms of resources to initiate and transfer colonists to than leaving the people the colony would have been made up of in place for a long enough amount of time to make giving up those resources seem prudent. If improvements in how we exploit various resources keep improving, that in itself might put a significant damper on any colonization efforts.
That leaves us with possibly the odd colony here and there or the odd probe. Small colonies would face high odds of dying off, and would be unlikely to be established far away - presumably nearby stars would be targeted. Unless these colonies then enter an aggressive expansionist phase, and either had the technology to pull it off (provide resources for itself) or had the fortune of finding a location that provides abundant resources, it would take a lot of time before such a colony could produce offshoots further away. Chances are they'd grow to fill their new solar system first, and run into the same hypothetical growth reductions as we're currently seeing with developed countries on earth.
That leaves radio. Why haven't we heard radio chatter? Stephen Baxter suggested a simple solution in the novel "Space": IF there are aliens out there, we might not want to make a big fuss about our existence, and also, a civilization may simply grow past broadcasting (That book does also, btw. pose an alternative explanation for the Fermi paradox, but stating it here would be a huge spoiler - it's a good read). We might already be nearing the time where we'll "go silent", as technological advance continues. Given the number of possible stars, how short time we've been listening, and how short periods potential civilizations may broadcast, it's very possible that there just aren't enough civilizations at the right stage of development that their radio chatter happened to intersect with the time periods we are currently monitoring. We may for that
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is this:
Once a civilization has derived the laws of physics and chemistry to sufficient precision and certainty, there is no longer any pressing need to pursue direct observation of extraterrestrial intelligence. You can simply assume that it exists, based on your local knowledge.
We are reaching this same point with our knowledge of biology; everywhere we look on Earth, we find life. Simply confirming the existence of microbial life on Mars would make it a bit less urgent to get all the way to Europa and verify that it's there too. If we did make it to Europa to confirm that life has evolved there as well, I'd be reasonably comfortable making the prediction that life exists pretty much everywhere else in the galaxy.
If there's no reason to doubt life elsewhere in the galaxy, there's probably intelligent life too. So why worry about going there and confirming something by direct observation, when there's a 99.999% probability that it's true? It makes more sense to stick around here for now and simulate what they're like instead of going there and seeing it directly.
Once we have learned how to just simulate the biochemistry of Europa with high enough fidelity, there's no longer any pressing need to go there, is there? If we make it that far and our simulations and models indicate the presence of life on extrasolar planets, that's good enough for me.
In other words, the reason the aliens haven't bothered to travel here, land, and say "take me to your leader" is because they know what would happen already. It doesn't matter what we are actually like. It doesn't matter what they're actually like either, because we can imagine them now and we will be able to simulate them soon enough.
The reason we don't run into aliens is because we can imagine and simulate them and they can imagine and simulate us and there's no point in actually confronting each other expensively IRL.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Looking at ourselves the concept of an expansionistic society surviving its limits on its original planet is pretty much going to require a sustanable society, not an expansionistic society.
If we continue our expansionistic ways it looks like we are more likely to hit a collapse than actually make it off our poor little mud ball. If we are to survive long enough to get off the mud ball we will probably be sociallized to sustainable rather than expansionistic tendancies. Thus any society that reaches the ability to explore/populate the universe is not going to actually care to do so.
Also considering how easy it is to destroy planetary objects once you have common space technology any conflicts remaining are going to be pretty devistating dirt side. Again reinforcing the point that you don't get off the mud ball and into interstellar space if your society is conflict/expansionistically structured.
... is to expand the content of what is in existance, as that is the onky way the conscious sum of all things knows its alive..
it comes down to the basic instinct of survival
The AC has acute ID-envy, Sigmund
Michio Kaku says that for a civilization to progress from a type 0 to a type 1 civilization (ie able to harness the laws of thermodynamics) is very unlikely without self destruction. It is very possible that other civilizations in outer space destroyed themselves (or nuked themselves back to the stone age) after discovering element 92 (as we might yet do).
Fermi makes a lot of assumptions. First it assumes that an advanced civilization is looking to expand. Just because we humans would doesn't mean all would. It assumes that we'd recognize an alien when we saw it - there's a good chance we wouldn't Silicon based life forms and Carbon based ones might not even notice each other.
A lot of commenters are assuming that if an advanced civilization found us they'd be studying us. Would we study aliens we found? What happened last time a group of humans decided to spread out and colonize? It would happen again, but with another species we probably wouldn't think of it as amoral to just "remove" them all. So, my assumption is that we know if we'd been found - because we'd all be dead. My first comment counter this because I'm assuming that another species would behave as we do.
Lastly, Fermi is assuming that the advanced civilization survived. We're not even sure that we're going to survive, let a long actually make it off of Earth to colonize anything. Who's to say any other civilization has?
PS. The speed of light is looking more and more to be variable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#.22Fas ter-than-light.22_observations_and_experiments
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Sometimes. Even more frequently it is economic in nature, looking for new resources and new markets.
Only if you narrowly define trade & cultural exchange as physical, such as dilithium crystals or visiting dance troupes.
If you accept any broader definition then non-material exchange is already going on hugely within our single planet. Japanese game shows on US television, software developed in Estonia, Chinese factories owned by Taiwanese entrepreneurs based in Canada with design teams in the US selling manufacturing expertise to Malaysian factories overseen by German engineers assembled with local labor.
Heck, the participants in this exchange come from multiple cultures, the communications are time-lagged and while it's value is debatable it's lack of physical instantation isn't.
Sure the lag times for interstellar communications would be years, but that just brings us back to the old sailing ship days. Then along with the spices and dyes there was lots of trade in ideas and technologies that substantially enriched the cultures, philosophies, and technologies of the participants.
Compare & contrast has always been a hugely useful tool. With the Earth's cultures coalescing into a global village with local variations 'outside' perspectives will eventually be invaluable, even if time-lagged by decades. By the time we're ready to go interstellar I expect we'll already have ex
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
1) A species capable of galactic colonization must be organized
2) Organization requires competition. The better the competition, the better the organization
3) Competition promotes conflict - either between species or within competing factions of a species
4) As the ability to colonize space develops, so does the ability to destroy the whole species
5) Since colonizing a new area is the essential goal of all species (survival requires species to spread as far as possible) reaching this "ultimate" goal will require overcoming the competition at all costs including destroying the original habitat and all members of the species.
6) All species capable of colonizing space must enevitably destroy themselves.
Colonization is not possible. Cooperation will NOT lead to galactic colonization as it will ony lead to cooperative use of existing resources.
At least that's my two cents.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
The fatal flaw in this premise is that we assume we know what an advanced civilization's colonization efforts would look like or that we'd recognize them as such even if we saw them. They don't even need to be actively hiding from us. Maybe they build Dyson's spheres or free-floating structures in the spaces between the stars, travel and communicate by some exotic or otherwise unknown means and leak very little EM radiation. Heck, maybe they emit a ton of EM but it looks like a natural phenomenon to us. We have examined very very little of this galaxy in detail. Much of it is shrouded in dust. The galaxy could be teeming with advanced civilizations, but we're far too blind and deaf to assume otherwise simply because we haven't seen evidence yet.
The first possibility, that there is no other life that we would recognize in the observable universe, resembles old conjectures: that the earth is the center of the solar system, that the solar system is the center of the universe, etc. Given the vastness of the universe, our uniqueness is possible but unlikely.
The second possibility, that there are others--again given the vastness of the universe--suggests that there are probably many others. This in turn suggests that it is unlikely that we are the oldest or most advanced life in the universe, and given how rapidly things have changed in only two centuries (every motor, all electronic devices, flight, etc.), it suggests that others, particularly others capable of reaching us, will be so far beyond us that a) they will either use us, enslave us, or eliminate us or; b) they will, with a generosity which will cost them very little, do what is best for us.
Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced science will be indistinguishable from magic. It would seem to be a corollary that any sufficiently advanced beings will be indistinguishable from divinity.
So. They could be here, and watching over us, waiting until they could contact us, if ever, without harm. Or it may take time, a very long time, before they can come, after they detect the output of the planetary civilization.
It could be that it would hurt us to know them, because of the contrast between what we are, and what truly civilized beings are.
Some how I get a feeling that we are already colonized.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I can't believe how provincial so many of the replies are...
Assumptions:
there isn't some way to magically ignore the laws of thermodynamics
technology advances at a rate within an order of magnitude of that on earth in the last 100 years
civilizations occur often enough for there to have been 1000s that were earth-like in the last billion years
Then...
Within the first 1000 years of achieving the equivalent of 20th century tech, sapients achieve superhuman intelligence, either through migrating to nanocomputers or through a combination of nanotech + biological manipulation. They have immense computing power and advanced tools to automatically design anything they can imagine that fits within physical law. They have control over matter to the atomic if not the subatomic level, bounded only by the available energy and physical law.
So...
they either convert their star to some other form that generates energy in a more efficient or controllable way, or they surround the star with panels to gather all free energy. In either case, all that should radiate from their star system is low energy infrared (unavoidable losses due to the 2nd law of thermo) and highly compressed communication packets (to the point of looking like static).
Someone, whether the equivalent of a kid doing a science project or a nation spreading their power, sends nanoprobes at near light speed (using laser propelled solar sails or, more likely, some much more advanced technology) to nearby star systems where factory systems self replicate using local raw materials. Eventually (likely in less than a year, assuming exponential growth rates with a tiny seed), enough infrastructure is there to grow or build sapients at the new star system. The process repeats itself.
The aliens should spread at near light speed in an ever-expanding volume.
Of course, there is all of that dark matter out there... it seems likely to me that there is are universe-wide alien civilizations, and that they leave some portion of the universe alone as starter cultures to get new races with new perspective on the universe.
These replies that assume big bulky aliens weighing 10s of pounds, made out of meat, and trolling around in 1970s era sci-fi space ships with blasters are missing the obvious. Only 600 years after the spread of movable type printing presses, we are on the verge of understanding human biology, building software that can do almost any engineering task a human can do, and controlling matter at the atomic level. If you were transported 200 years into the future, most activity will be happening in ways that you can't even sense, much less comprehend.
That is, assuming we don't somehow kill ourselves off altogether or destroy the infrastructure that makes technological civilization possible.
Here's one way around the Fermi paradox: Galactic police.
I'm assuming that the theory of natural selection applies to all life everywhere. Maybe that's a false assumption, but I have no reason (in my ignorance) to think that the assumption is false.
So all life is in competition. It is the default state. Part of the competition is the desire to reproduce and expand. Humans have already shown that when a more 'advanced' group meets a less 'advanced' group, it spells disaster for the less advanced group. Likely all advanced aliens contacting us would be disastrous to us whether it was intentional or not.
If an early civilization realized this, they could have developed the power to stop other groups from interfering from one another - somehow setting up each civilization in its own 'reserve'. Perhaps once (or 'if') any group developed to the stage when they are not belligerent expansionists, they are welcomed into the 'elite' groups of galactic citizens.
I'm not talking about God or anything here. Simply more advanced species evolved through simple natural selection who recognize that competition is not always a good thing.
OTOH, colonize the galaxy? Boring!!!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The whole discussion of Fermi's theorem presumes that the collective human race actually CARES about some other civilization across the galaxy.
In fact, it's doubtful that the collective human race even cares about its own long-term persistence on planet earth. That would be like Galileo planning to prevent global warming in the year 2007. He would be so inadequate at even guessing the challenges we face today that he may as well not bother.
I don't think it's a big stretch to say that most human's don't even care about their own decendant's future when you start talking 4+ generations. (seriously, how many of you agonize over your great-great-(x 10)-great grandchildren's quality of life?)
And finally, consider this: if we (the collective human race) doesn't care that much, why do we assume the "aliens" will?!!! Just like us humans, "aliens" may have the technological capacity to travel around the universe. That doesn't mean they care to do so.
Technology is irrelavent without the will to create and employ it. BTW, this argument alone completely side-steps Fermi's "theorem", which I think is a load of crap.
- FCOL Whomp! (forgot my login pwd)
...scientists discredit theories of the existence of intelligent life on a remote planet called Irth. Using the Fermi paradox, Blarg scientists reasoned, "If such life did exist, it would have colonized the universe by now. Or at least attempted to contact us. And yet, all we have detected are transmissions from something called 'The Fox News Network'. Odds don't look good for life on Irth."
Have gnu, will travel.
There is no need to assume some civilization would colonize the whole universe. Most space-faring civilizations have accepted the opinion of a well-respected being who said (or diffracted, or immolated, or floobied):
"640 kilo-parsecs is enough for anybody."
The reason no intelligent life has been seen beyond the Earth is because it is being suppressed by inhibitors that are doing their best to protect intelligence in the long run.
People keep bringing up radio as the means of alien communications. I say no way. To an alien, electromagnetic radiation is the worst possible means of communications through interstellar distances. If an alien race did happen to stumble onto one of our broadcasts they would probably think, "oh look, a race that has just learned to crawl". When those guys talk to each other they use tightly focused gigahertz gravity waves. They don't attenuate with distance, they go through anything, even a sun, and are totally interference free. I know, cause I talk to them alla time with this "GraviTalk" walkie talkie they left behind on one of their visits.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Ala Asimov's Foundations series the Earth could be part of a galactic empire in a fallow period. Perhaps our species does inhabit the entire universe but we are in a dark age and the Earth is just coming out of its barbaric period. Just an interesting thought - not a belief.
I thought it was a good idea
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/1 8/1359214
The difficulties are enormous. I think many people pointed out why the multi generation ship would be a huge problem.
It seems like this would take a united planetary effort. Considering we can't even unite to conserve resources and cut world poisoning emissions, but we are going to unite the planet to send some tiny portion of the population on a one way trip that none of will ever even hear about. I don't thinks so.
Short of knowledge that the Sun will soon explode, we will never get enough agreement to attempt such a feat.
The only thing that seems likely to colonize IMO is some kind of self replicating probe. Not a real pleasant thought.
The two choices are: populate the galaxy/universe or become extinct. Staying on the earth will ultimately lead to extinction when the Sun dies, if not before. We need to reduce our risk of extinction by spreading the risk over many planets. Say we seed another planet with humans. That planet's inhabitants will then evolve into a completely different animal. Inevitably, Earth's inhabitants will all die off. Haven't we still gone extinct? Populating the universe doesn't secure our species existence.
From wikipedia. .
Okay then. Many people have pointed out the numerous and embarrassing flaws in this logic, but I really don't think Fermi was being stupid or ignorant at the time he posited his question. It was the 50's, after all, and people trusted their government. People did not yet grasp how the world worked with regard to government secrecy and population thought control. From our stance today, we have a great deal of available insight into this; we know about Joseph Goebbels, we know that advertising is incredibly effective, we know that the strobe effect of Television puts the human brain into a highly suggestive state. We know that what you teach kids at a young age shapes them for life. And if we dig deeper, we know that the human brain is easily manipulated in far more disgusting ways; (Greebaum).
It is easy to control people's beliefs. Churches have done it for centuries. For those who reject religious dogma, the media picks up the ball; ie, replace 'religion' with 'cult of science'. Real scientists don't care about embarrassment or being laughed at; they can't afford to because at some point every new and important idea posited by a scientist is going to be ridiculed and attacked by the layperson. So those who fear to talk about UFO's in an open manner, without any trace of fear or bias or mocking doubt in their tones, are not really scientists. They are just another brand of dogmatist.
As I've said, it is easy to control people's beliefs, --and by extension, their perceived realities.
So continuing Fermi's logic. . , If logic implies that the Milky Way is teeming with life, then perhaps it IS, and perhaps there is another reason we have not heard from that life.
Consider: There are UFO's constantly buzzing our skies. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of crop circles. We have countless reports from people who claim abduction experiences.
How can any rational person live in the same world as all of this and insist that there is no evidence? That's kind of strange. Crop circles are the perfect example; they are there in a manner which is available to anybody, (One recalls the old complaint of the sceptic, "I'll believe it when there is some evidence layed at my feet!"), they cannot be rationalized away; (the Ropes and Planks explanation falls hopelessly short when you get close enough to actually look at the details of the problem.) And yet, the world carries on as though nothing were happening.
It reminds me of a Douglas Adams creation; a system of invisibility where rather than bend light, you bend minds. --So that people ignore like crazy that which is right in front of them.
Aliens are already here, and they have been for centuries. The logic, if expanded to include this, might want to ask this little question...
How much effort do humans make to communicate with the cattle they raise? (As above, so below.)
Well, we've got the crop circle side of the equation. But we also have the abduction side. There are two different approaches to anyt
Look at our politics- could we gather the will to build a 10 trillion dollar multi-generation star ship?
Over time the relative costs of such should decrease just as the relative cost of orbital flights has. Someday it may soon be in the range that say the Mormans might find within reach. And, such a group is not as subject to safety expenses that a gov't project would require.
Table-ized A.I.
It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
In other breaking news... the Earth is round.
You're nothing; like me.
But since there is no evidence of this
Not entirely true. There have been some bizzar UFO sightings that in court would be enough testimony to fry a hundred OJ's. Slamdunk proof is elusive, but an alien civalization thousands of years more advanced than us would probably want to keep it that way. This is called the "zoo theory" in Fermi-speak.
Whether alien UFO's are true or not, their pattern does fit the zoo hypoth.
Table-ized A.I.
that we can't even get "The Hitchhikers' Guide to The Galaxy" onto Google book search, which means I can't link to the original of the quote about how we primitives think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
There's always more choices than we can recognize, it may seem that civilizations have three choices but that can be a myoptic view of where we are now. Whats to say that a civilization may not want to colonize the rest of the galaxy? Whats to say there may be other oppurtunities open as we progress and science and technology open new doors? A Civilization that attains immortality may just decide to travel the galaxy and limit their reproduction?
Chimpanzees imagining what a higher intelligence would do.
It's laughable.
First of all, "civilization" is a meaningless term derived strictly from human behavior. It might be possible to imagine a collection of technologically advanced entities who do not exist in anything we would term a "civilization" or "society". In fact, I suspect truly advanced entities do not operate in "societies" at all, but are more like the fictional representation of "dragons" in fantasy literature - more or less independent entities who only interact with others of their kind for specific reasons.
Second, "colonization" might be utterly irrelevant to an advanced intelligence for any number of reasons, especially reasons we haven't thought of based on the nature of that intelligence.
Third, the concepts require the notion of biological reproduction. What about a sentient entity which is not based on biology? Such an entity has no need to reproduce. While it can and may reproduce, there is no evidence that it or any particular population of it would see any need to reproduce to the level of "colonization" or even "civilization" in the human sense.
If my prediction is correct that a Transhuman requires nothing but energy, materials, nanomass, computing power and knowledgebases to exist, what need does a Transhuman have to reproduce or "colonize"?
All the Fermi Paradox demonstrates is the lack of imagination on the part of so-called "scientists".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
How long does it take to evolve to the degree that some semblance of communication can be established. One way communication is what I'm thinking, in the manner of humans: "Hello world?"
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Since we are all referncing sci-fi as freely as science, I'd like to put forth the conjecture in Greg Bear's EON, that humanity, rather than explore physical planets, builds a means to travel along the threat of possibility, exploring the worlds found there.
"like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
Remain on Earth only and become extinct!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Humankind has these three choices - Colonize, stay on Earth, or become extinct?
That's in essence the three options each of us have every moment of our lives. No big brain needed to figure that one out.
I can leave this chair, remain sitting in it, or die on the spot eventually.
Actually I'll die on whatever spot I'm in so I really have only two choices.
Ok humankind has the better of me in that case.
I think Fermi's Paradox makes a false assumption.
:)
I am willing to conceed that the assumption that Earth is not a unique or rare event, and that there are many instances of intelligent life.
However there is an assumption of time. It assumes that intelligent life somehow always started before it did on Earth. Why is that?
If you are going to assume that Earth is average and thus life somewhat common, you also have to assume that the time in which life takes to develop is also about the same everywhere and thus our current civ is about as advanced as anywhere plus minus a few freaks. The freaks would be rare, and thus in all probibility not close to anyone in particular.
What that means is that while there may be life out there, they have only been around for about as long as we have, for about the same period, with probably about the same advancments.
Considering we have only been putting out Radio noise for about 60-70 years in any volume, and considering A) the speed in which those waves travel (not the speed of light) and B) the amount of degradaion that I am sure will also happen, our observerable footprint is pretty damn small (at least at the scales we are talking here). If we assume that we are all in the same boat as this, then it is no wonder than no one have met anyone else (or that those meeting would be very rare indeed, perhaps only if you reside close to one of the very rare freaks). So the only reason we have to blame for not meeting any Aliens is that we haven't developed a technology or had the will to do so yet, and thus pretty much no one else has either.
IMHO you can't make one assumtion without making the other, and when you make both, it is easy to see why there has been no evidence of other life.
Quid Pro quo or something like that
I am sure if we blow up our Sun someone out there might see it after many many years. Course we would be quite dead, and of course we lack the ability to do so anyway. Perhaps all those Nova's we see are not natural occurances, but a lonely Alien lifeform reaching out for contact. Morse code (or the like) may require the death of many Suns just to say "Hello my name is Earth".
We have only two choices, not three:
1. Stay on earth and eventually go extinct.
2. colonize the galaxy, and then eventually go extinct.
a. Design a colony ship;
Has anyone done all the calculations and designed a colony ship? Even down to the nitty gritty details of where to put wiring and plumbing? The problem with designing something is you have to pay people to work on those details. Since open source is all the rage nowadays maybe someone should start an 'open source' starship where people can devote their spare time to figuring out those problems.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in it. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination." - Douglas Adams
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
A lot of folks around the world would say we ARE being visited .. :-)
Its just not in the mainstream media and consciousness
So, we'd better re-read Shaw's Back to Methuselah and figure out how to extend human life, as a necessary precondition to The Conquest of Space.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Intelligent Design is not. But intelligent design is. Humans are neither.
Intelligent life exists in quantity. However, they have learned through violent competition for choice resources (i.e. planets) to be very quiet. That would eliminate the chances that we'd find them from here.
They are also probably looking for either beings like us or planets like ours. If altruistic aliens find us first (e.g. close encounters) how exciting! Alternatively, if a conquering species locate us first we're doomed (e.g. battlefield earth). It's just a matter of time and luck.
With regard to why we haven't seen them yet, you'd have to determine the minimum likely scanning interval for a galaxy the size of the milky way. Assuming nearly instantaneous travel, there are still millions of stars to visit. How often would a sentient race return to check up on things? Every thousand years would reveal that nothing much has changed here on Earth for the last ten thousand years--assuming they haven't been back in the last 500 years or so.
Another and cheaper method would be to deposit robotic monitors in each solar system designed to send a signal upon certain event triggers. I would suspect we've earned some marks for getting off the ground, but since we make infrequent and very short trips outside our atmosphere, we're still probably not worth their efforts or attention. Once we get manufacturing and agriculture up into space, establish self-sufficient space colonies, we'll warrant a closer look.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
the probability that advancing civilizations, on their way to developing interstellar travel, always end up building a Large Hadron Collider which wipes out life on their planet is near 1.
oh... crap.
a moving beacon that enteres orbit and disintigrates.
Correction, should be "has an orbit that decays, burning up in an atmosphere". Can I outsource proofreading?
Table-ized A.I.
There's a lot of monkeys here on Earth. Many many many different species of monkeys. Life on Earth arose and took over the planet. You've got millions of different animals all over the surface of the Earth. Wouldn't it seem likely that a planet with a similar composition, in a similar distance from a similar star, grow life of it's own? Wouldn't it be cool to find semi-intelligent space 'monkeys' on another planet? Wouldn't it be even cooler to find super-intelligent space 'monkeys'? Doesn't that seem possible, or even LIKELY that a super-intelligent space 'monkey' exists? Heck, it doesn't even have to be monkey like... there could be super-smart space manatees... or rock monsters... We think we're special, but we're really not. We're just space monkeys.
"I believe in God, which means I have to accept that "God created the heavens and the earth" (in that order :-)."
You really "believe" in the supposed idea that the three letters "G", "o", and "d" are porported to ascribe to? I'll bet you everything I have that you have absolutely no idea of what you mean when you say "I believe in God." What does the word "God" mean? Does the word mean a person, place, or thing? If your idea of what the word "God" stands for doesn't match what my idea does, then does it mean anything to even say "I believe in God" to me? I have no idea of what you are talking about. You could be saying "I believe in Dop" for all I know.
I don't know what a "God" is. The idea of a "God" makes absolutely no sense to me. You might as well be describing a non idea. Is "God" a name of something? What then? What is it? A magical wizard? Thor?
Its high time for people who "believe in god" to just shut their flapping mouths because we rational beings have no idea of what you are referring to.
The 8-step program:
c t:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Proje
Which came first,
The Chicken or the Egg
String theory show the possiblity of creating new universes as well as the existance of other dimentions.
It could possibly be far easier to expand a civilization to other dimentions as well as newly created universes then explore our own vast universe.
John L. Sokol
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
An interesting website, about a possible future where humans have already colonized part of the galaxy:
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
This is not the sig you're looking for.
One problem I see is that that paper like most extrapolate how much computing resources we will likely have in the future, the "post-human" future, and it reasonably would be large. But then they estimate how much computing resources it should require to simulate human history, which, admitted up til now would be relatively small. What they seem to miss is the amount of human history that will take place between now and the "post human" period when the vast computing resources would be available that are needed to make such simulations. It seems self-evident that any given civilization would never have the resources to fully simulate itself, or any state in its prior history close to its present state. There must be a huge gap between what a given civilization is able to simulate and the present state of that civilization. It is not even apparent that the computational abilities of a civilization would ever grow faster than the detailed complexities of that civilization, nevermind having to simulate the entire cummulative histories of that civilization.
Therefore, it seems likely that any such "ancestoral" simulations would be *extremely* ancestoral and primitive relative to the present state of the simulators ("directors"). And the corrollary to this notion then would be that arguments posited that we must be now living in a simulation because most such self-aware beings would be living in simulations relative to the "original" species, are now much less plausible because this gap between what can be simulate and the current reality includes a huge gap in the numbers of beings (presuming a continued growth in populations) and serves to greatly dilute the probability-that-we-are-simulations argument.
If you were really interested in colonizing another planet, you'd want to minimize the amount of energy you expend traveling, because when you multiply it out by the distance you're going it's going to be big. It wouldn't be a very good idea to send a whole intelligent body in a ship. They're both immeasurably fragile relative to the destructive powers of the vast emptiness of space. You'd be better off sending data representing a state of an intelligent being without the ship, but that's even a ton of data if you're talking about transmitting it zillions of light years.
So what's the tiniest amount of data it would take to colonize another planet? Probably something like the tiniest essence of our life, like a molecule or two that have a unique tendency to try to make copies of themselves. Just ship the molecular configuration data off into a chunk of rock on the surface of just the right planet and wait a few million years (much less than it would take to physically get there) and you've just colonized another place on the other side of the universe.
Hey, wait! That sounds like something we think happened here, isn't it? Neat.
If intelligent life forms had so much time to develop and find us, they are probably much more developed and masters of finding other intelligent life forms than us. Also they are masters of hiding. Humanity started to seriously look outside of its planet only in the last 100 years. Once we are capable of finding them, they'll surely contact us :)
I just hope that the dominant intelligent life form in the galaxy is less violent and much more patient than humanity.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If the non-random radio source is some sort of cosmological (non-intelligent) event, then it would still warrant extra-terrestrial research.
You seem to be saying that non-intelligent patterns would still be of interest in radio waves, but not in DNA. I don't really see this as relavent either way, but it still seems false. Exploration is exploration, regardless whether it happens in DNA or radio waves.
Table-ized A.I.
"Colonized the galaxy by now".Isn't it Way oversimplified? Rationally speaking,
Aliens would not colonize something just because its there,there must be a reason to colonize,a need or perceptible benefit. You don't see anyone campaigning to colonize the sun(yes,the surface of sun).
Will you leave your home system to travel through billions of stars in search of new home? What if you happy in local solar system?
The only thing they could be interested here is research or observation.Chances are against that two planets have the same conditions for life.
Increased bandwidth requirements are driving utilization of spread-spectrum technology such as DSSS, FHSS, and OFDM instead of single-band transmissions. These transmissions are extremely hard to detect, looking much like random noise, especially if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. They also allow the transmission of more data with less gain, allowing the usage of lower transmission levels, making detection at distance pretty much impossible.
Sooner or later we're going to have to restrict our usage of single-band transmissions for better spectrum utilization. On the cosmic scale of things, this will likely happen quickly.
I don't read AC A human right
I for one welcome our yet-undiscovered overlords...
The history of the universe in relation to the history of life on earth is practically infinite. If there is a relatively infinite number of places life can exist (planets water, the right heat, etc) then it stands to reason there should be an infinite number of civilizations out there, infinite older infinite younger. Infinite more advanced, infinite slobbering apes.
So, why hasn't one of these infinite more advanced societies sent some evidence our way?
1) They are sneaky (yeah, right)
2) It's impossible to inhabit other planets successfully (if there was one chance in one million, and infinite number of civilizations, then an infinite number of civilizations would have colonized the universe, or at least one)
3) They are still on their home planet, and they will never leave, but still exist.
4) They are extinct, and there is no possibility of any civilization surviving.
Basically, from the probability, the earth will follow either three or four. Tough luck folks, we're all gonna die. If there was a chance of us colonizing the universe, then someone else would have already done it.
That whole argument decays when you consider the universe is finite, and the big bang wasn't all that long ago. Replace all the "infinite's" with "finite" and you have a more accurate calculation, but you're probably going to get close to the same conclusion. We are all gonna die.
What's not to say one hasn't? It is entirely possible that an extraterrestrial race has conquered ANOTHER galaxy. Or even ours! We could be under watch and/or cultivation by a higher race.
If history repeats itself, why can't we study the future?
The Nazi's were hardly secular.
"We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people."
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928
And sure, Secularism killed a lot of people last century, but what is that but a blip in the bloody history of religion? The religiously fueled carnage in the middle east right now is thousands of years old. What secular hate can even compare?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Seems to me the last two choices equate to the same thing. Meaning, there are only two choices.
At the current burn rate, humans may be functionally extinct in perhaps two generations.
There are hundreds of billionaires in the world, dozens with more than 10 Billion they could spare and still be billionaires...
If one or more of them got together and endowed The Star Ship fund, with 10 Billion, and let it sit in an investment that compounded at 10% (like a stock market index fund), it would be worth 100 Trillion by the year 2100 or so.
Of course 100 Trillion "won't buy what it used to", by then, but on the other hand, other advances might make some things cheaper. By then, maybe carving out a habitat in an asteroid or some such wouldn't be impossible. Maybe they will have a space elevator working by then too. That will help.
It is difficult to amass such wealth, and usually it gets dispersed within a few generations. Another fantasy "mega investment" would be to endow an entire country a fund that would completely eliminate taxes for its residents. There is no logical reason why this couldn't happen, just political reasons.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If aliens do exist we assume
1) They came from this universe.
2) They came from this dimension
3) They came from this time.
4) Aliens are like us, if they were like us we would be in a human nugget by now.
5) Aliens would want to talk to us, just like we talk to monkeys.
6) If aliens wanted this planet they could easily push meteorites into are path, and we would be none the wiser.
The simple fact is that in order to colonise the universe you need a shortcut that allows you to travel faster than the speed of light, otherwise humans arent going anywhere. If the shortcut does exist then this means the distance between us and any other galaxy/solar system/planet is irrelevant.
Aliens could easily be 10 or 100's of billions of years more advanced than us. If an alien has watched humans for a couple of years they would quickly realise most humans are retarded.
Last of all, the more advance the alien the less likely they need to colonise this universe. Advanced aliens could
1) Create there own universe, galaxy, solar system, planets and sun.
2) Mastered the equation of this universe which could allow them to create anything, they could have the technology to break all atoms in photons and neutrons and then recombining them into any type of atom they choose.
But I for one welcome our new human overlords.
Each of these steps occurs with lowered probability, let's see where we're at...
1. Physics in the universe just right. Check.
2. Nice enough conditions in a given galaxy. The Milky Way seems ok. Check.
3. Star that's relatively stable enough for planets. Sol. Check.
4. Planet formation in a habitable zone around star. Check.
5. Planet with right amount and variety of elements for life formation. Earth. Check.
6. Creation of simple unicellular organisms. Bacteria, protozans, etc. Check.
(Steps 1-6 should be common enough to be more or less a given in the universe.)
7. Evolution of multicellular organisms. Sponges, jellyfish, stuff like that. Check.
(7 seems fairly likely given enough time.)
8. Evolution of advanced multicellular organisms. Critters with wide variety of cellular differentiation. Check.
(8 probably needs a variety of environments and stressors to trigger differentiation.)
9. Evolution of advanced multicellular organisms with ability to think. Pretty much any animal with a specialized nervous system and can proactively respond to environment. Check.
10. Evolution of advanced multicellular organisms with ability to use tools. Some birds, apes, etc. Check.
11. Evolution of advanced multicellular organisms with higher level reasoning, or intelligence. Apes, parrots, whales/porpoises. Check.
12. Evolution of advanced multicellular organisms combining higher level reasoning with tool use, thus creating technology. (Think pre-industrial age.) Humans. Check.
13. Higher level multicellular organisms with advanced (post industrial) technology. Harness electricity, use manufacturing processes to make machines to do work. At this level there is radio, hypothetically this is where you can talk to life around other stars. Yep, humans again. Check.
14. Same as 13, but now smart/wise enough to not use advanced technology to destroy selves. At this point we're splitting atoms, splicing DNA, and the means for planetary travel is understood too. So far so good. Can't say check for sure, it's a WIP.
15. Ability to use advanced technology to ensure prolonged survival by proctecting supportive environment. Not yet, we're not sure of what we're doing to the environment, nor have we devised a surefire way to deal with killer space rocks. Negative.
16. Ability to propagate to other planets increasing odds of survival. Negative.
17. Ability to propagate to other star systems. We can't do the planet thing yet, so this seems even more unlikely. Negative.
So far we've been lucky enough to just barely hold on to 14 on the list I made up. And we only know of ourselves at that level so far... Odds are, creatures getting to 12 is difficult, even if they meet criteria for intellgence at step 11. If we're lucky to hear from another 13 or 14 on this list, that makes our outlook better. One could hope to see some 17's, as that would awaken us to a much brighter possibility. When 2036 and the near earth asteroid comes up, it might be make it or break time for 15, provided we can even keep up with our current 14 till then. Let's hope we can load the dice a little in our favor.
Oddly enough, the Drake Equation, Fermi Paradox, and subsequent Zoo Hypothesis are also album titles by a great band from Chicago known as Tub Ring.
That is, if you're into that Faith No More, or Mr. Bungle type of sound. They're quite experimental, which is refreshing in this day and age. (I know, I know, off topic... I couldn't resist!)
If other life has developed and is travelling about the galaxy, this scenario could explain their existing and being out of sight.
They're treating our solar system as a wildlife preserve. (Sort of like the Prime Directive, but not entirely.) They could colonize it easily it if they really wanted to, but that would wreck the value it already has. And every now and then they come along to gather data and/or entertain themselves. (If SETI could somehow find the alien's equivalent of the Discovery Channel, I bet you'd see us on one of the shows.) Just as people (aliens) go to the African Savanna (Earth) to watch lions (humans), they don't hop out of the car (UFO) and interact with 'em. Likewise the aliens don't communicate much in-depth dialog with us, nor do we with wildlife. Also like humans wandering a wildlife preserve, aliens will probably have the equivalent of rifles or tranquilizer darts for protection if they feel significantly threatened. (Paralysis/lost time experiences?) Then of course a select few alien researchers are doing their very own version of the tag and release program, which explains the abduction phenomena. Of course they have to put the tag somewhere where we can't easily tamper with it, which explains why backwoods Bubba isn't to fond of such experiences.
Lene Hau, a Harvard Uni physicist, has slowed light (even stopped it) in recent experiments.l
See http://www.physicscentral.com/people/2002/hau.htm
If light can be slowed its speed is not constant... who's to say in another decade faster than 3E8 ms-1 isn't the upper limit. Not to mention worm holes etc. In evaluating all theories you should remember our humble beginnings. There is more to come.
Never say never.
Get over it.
Even more likely, aliens were about to visit us using warp drive, but our experiments with the Omega molecule (what we call "buckyballs") screwed up subspace so badly that warp drive is completely unusable in our region of space.
On the positive side, it should keep away all those short-sighted Federation officers who think that the prudent course of action when you encounter powerful technology you don't understand is to destroy it.
http://outcampaign.org/
Most comments here assume air/oxygen breathing aliens to colonise space. There could be intelligent life that is severely disadvantages with regard to space travel. Intelligent fish, for example would have to launch a water filled container in orbit for their space programme, not to mention the challenge to create rocket engines under water. Furthermore, they would probably not even have an astronomy programme since they do not see the stars. Metals or anything else that needs fire for creation or production would be off limits. They could still be intelligent, have great communications, philosophies and art and culture but we'll never hear from them, SETI or not.
Other aliens could be breathing different gasses or need lower/higher temperature bands. It could well be that Jupiter or Saturn have been colonised fat millennia without us knowing it. They are simply not interested in those oxygen atmosphere planets and too introverted to contact other civilisations that don't fall within their range of ideal living conditions.
As we progress our communications become more focussed and/or cable based. There are much fewer aerials on today's roof-tops since most TV signals are sent by cable. There could be advanced civilisations that refrain from using radio signals altogether and we will not detect anything from them.
It's nonsensical to talk about the probability of one's own existence, since one's own existence is a given, i.e. its probability is 1.
http://outcampaign.org/
... this region of space is scheduled for demolition to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
http://outcampaign.org/
If they're intelligent enough to expand throughout the galaxy then that likely means they're intelligent enough to know better than to make themselves known to us. We treat each other badly enough, I would hate to think how we'd treat them.
Of course - the answers you may get can vary wildly depending on the input you give. One question that has to be asked is: Do we have a civilization on earth or are we still barbarians?
We are still barbarians because...
And there are actually only two alternatives: Expand or become Extinct, if we are staying on earth it's only a question of when extinction will occur. Be it through a pandemic plauge, asteroid impact or war, pick your poison...
Expanding into the galaxy will certainly require technology that's more advanced than we have today, but we know some of the obstacles that we will encounter and that means that we are on our way.
We know that a large number of stars actually have planetary systems in one way or another. In a near future we are likely to be able to see more and more extrasolar planets in better and better detail. Right now it's more or less guesswork and estimations about the actual composition of the extrasolar planets based on our knowledge of our own planetary system. We may be in for some great surprises!
And expansion of humankind into the galaxy will very likely at the beginning be done with seedships with a very small crew and a large number of frozen embryos. The Science Fiction with large starships crewed by a large number of humans is in a distant future, if ever achieved. A more likely scenario would be the ability to create warp tunnels as in Tunnel in the sky. It would also be far more efficient than a starship since a starship will only be able to transport a few people at a time while a tunnel may be able to transport continuously. We have already observed tunneling on a laboratory level, although it's still a very unpredictable phenomenon.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
As appealing as the idea might be - I doubt it for a number of reasons:
1. If industrial-scale fusion cannot be achieved, it is going to be extremely hard to build this system.
2. It might not be economical to completely surround the star. If it isn't completely surrounded, the system of solar collectors might just look like a random dust cloud to us.
3. If industrial-scale fusion can be achieved, what's the point in building this monstrosity ? It is far more convenient just to siphon some fuel off the nearest gas giant, or maybe even the star itself. That way, you're not tethered to living near a star.
4. Fusion might not be the end as far as energy generation goes. If a 100% matter-energy conversion can be achieved, the energy output of a Dyson sphere might be neglegible compared to it.
You guys did not know?
Iraq, Iran, Anunnaki, Aliens, GWB
Okay, I'm not well versed in probability, but I still think you can talk about the chances of an event having occurred at the time of there occurrence. For instance, if you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of it landing on heads. If I just flipped a coin, and it landed on heads, would I now say that the chance of the coin flip landing on heads was 1? I think I would still say it had a 50/50 chance at the time.
Of course, if you think the entire universe is completely deterministic, there is no chance; but I don't think that, and I'm not going to argue with someone who does.
How do we know that they didn't and we're it!
How about:
v e/columnists/chi-0701010141jan01,0,5874175.column
http://ufoevidence.org/
http://www.nuforc.org/
http://disclosureproject.org/
And recently:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automoti
Two economists walking down a street...
First one says, looking on the ground: "Look, a hundred dollars note!"
Second one responds: "Impossible: if there was one, somebody would have taken it already."
Sure, but in this case, the universe is flipping a coin, and if it's tails, you don't ever exist. The fact that you're even asking this question depends on the outcome of the experiment.
This comment explains it quite well.
http://outcampaign.org/
Maybe you are the most advance civilization in Universe. I mean, someone should be that, maybe we are. It's not impossbile. Also, it's not impossible, although unlikely, that we are the ONLY lifeform in the Universe.
As far as I know, our planet emits a lot of neutrinos, as a results of nuclear powerplants. There you have it, instead of searching for radiowaves, like SETI (that's why I registered for Mersenne Prime Search instead), search for planet emitting neutrinos. They must have nuclear activity. Still a pre-warp civilization, but a least comparable to ours. Off course, spotting neutrinos is not easy, but this should be easy for an advance civilization, would it?
Life that spreads beats out life that doesn't spread. So all life that survives has a drive to spread.
Presuming that a really technologically advanced race couldn't take a solar system apart & put it back together however they like is naive.
Presuming that a race that has had advanced technology for 1000 years would be recognizable, and could fall back into some prehistoric state, is naive.
Most humans in 200 years will probably not be recognizable as humans, and may well not be recognizable as discrete beings. Matter converts to energy at a pretty incredible rate, and there's no reason to believe we won't be able to convert all mass we come across into smart mass that supports our purposes.
That is ignoring the obvious fact that a race that survives 1000 years of advanced technology won't just be able to do anything we can imagine; they will have discovered so many new principles about how the universe works that most of what they'll do we can't even fathom.
That is far too simplistic. On the one hand, you're talking about competing for resources from a common repository of same. On the other, you're saying that said competition is built into every life form in such a way that, even though intelligent, they cannot modify or abdicate the drive. Humans already show that such abdication is possible, and common. Firemen save people at the cost of their own lives. This neither propagates their line nor extends their life; yet the urge to live is strong and built-in. A more advanced race can no doubt easily defeat such abstracts as "gee, it'd be nice to own more territory that we have to cross light years to get to, and then perhaps fight for." If it likes. So while I agree such a scenario is possible, I don't agree that it is inevitable.
On the contrary; such capabilities have not been demonstrated outside of science fiction (of which I am a huge fan, and work with professionally) and therefore it is naive to assume that they exist until (a) they are demonstrated by someone else, or (b) we work out how to do it ourselves.
Well, you're saying two things. Recognizable is not something I am presuming. In fact, I specifically said that many possibilities include the very idea that we're simply not recognizing them, and they are already here. The other, that a race of some arbitrary advancement could fall back into some prehistoric state, is a presumption that I take from our own very close brush with this via the cold war. We were on many days just seconds from destroying our entire technological base, running head-on into huge obstacles in the form of disease, starvation, desperate competition for scarce resources, radiation, extreme weather... the more technical we become, the further back a fall like that would likely take us, at least the way it seems to me. One simple example is that should such a thing happen to us today, virtually no one has the skills needed to survive. Computer skills would be worthless; computers would no longer function. Shopping is out of the question. Heat won't come from utility companies, nor will power. Medicine, a high technology undertaking if there ever was one, would fall back to the bare minimums of "keep warm, elevate feet, wash hands." Most people would die under such a change in conditions. So I reject your assertion that such a fall is unlikely or preventable. I think the higher you go, the harder you'll fall.
Perhaps this is the case. So?
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to so believe, not the least of which is science doesn't support such an idea. There are hints, but we have no tools that can do the kinds of manipulations you are positing. It is a lovely idea, but so far, it is restricted to Star Trek's matter duplication and food creation props. In other words, science fiction again.
It is not at all obvious that they will be able to do "anything we can imagine." It is perhaps
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All of the scenarios you're giving are promoting survival of the group at the expense of survival of the individual. I do believe that any successful life will take up a large fraction of any resource it can use.
It only takes one that does take advantage of those resources to make irrelevant all of the others. This has happened over & over throughout the history of life on earth, so there's an amazing precedent to believe that life will occupy virtually all available resources.
And I think that's crazy. If current society fell altogether, all over the planet, leaving only pockets of 100 or so people living in isolated communities, we would still have billions of books spread all over. Even if we had to rebuild the whole of civilization, we would do so much faster than if we were starting from scratch.
The difference between civilization falling now & the times it has fallen in the past is essentially the fact that the printing press exists now. There are so many copies of so many books running around that we would be hard put to lose the information.
In a society that built smart matter, either through advanced biological methods or other means of doing molecular manufacturing, an individual could build millions of seeds that could each produce a high level of technology with nothing more than carbon dioxide, water, & sunlight or temperature gradient. You would have lots of places where civilization was founded, giving high redundancy. You would notice if a whole planet stopped sending messages to the rest of the universe & check up on them.
It is already demonstrated that matter can be taken apart and put back together with atomic, or at least molecular, accuracy to be 'smart matter' that achieves a purpose. All life on earth does this, all the time. The only speculation I'm giving is that you could use technology to control this process to a large degree, and that it can be done with a large variety of stock material, not just Carbon Hydrogen Oxygen Nitrogen. The first part is a very small leap; the second is a much larger one, but if we figure out how to control nuclear processes, it can be bypassed.
;-) I'm saying that there are so many possible different ways to do this, and nature has been so susceptible to even the primitive tools we've brought to bear on it so far, that it is far more 'out-there' to speculate that technology can't/won't solve these problems than the opposit
If you can control matter at the atomic level, you should be able to cause fusion in any element combination that is lighter than iron, yielding energy & allowing you to transmute one element to another.
I am definitely speculating, but I stand by my assertion that it is much more naive to speculate that technology can't do these basic things (moving atoms from one place to another with near-atomic accuracy, cheaply, and converting matter to energy with a lot of freedom as to the method).
I think I've made my point about 'smart matter'. Regarding matter to energy, the options that I can see right away are:
* build a black hole and capture photons radiated as ionized matter falls into it
* essentially 'cold fusion'; force atoms together using macroscopic forces
* find some way to encourage decay in heavy atoms (bombard with some subatomic particle, etc)
* just surround the sun with solar panels and drop light elements into it
Obviously this is hand-waving. I'm not saying I could go build a matter-to-energy converter and reshape the planet to my whim at an atomic level
Hey this is kwesi stewart: aka fire man boyzie aka Anonymous Coward, anyway...
I just have to say, there are so many explanations against the fermi paradox that I can't stop thinking of new ones.
If I were an another form of intelligent life living elsewhere in the galaxy I would only populate the galaxy up to the point that other intelligent life living everywhere else cannot observe me. I would do this because I wouldn't want the other intelligent life to imitate me which would lead to conflict.
- OR -
Maybe there is no driving force to populate more than one planet. If it takes 25+ years to get from one solar system to the next AND 400Tonnes of fuel are used to carry one Kilogram then how much luxuries could I carry to this new home? It would be 25 years before I walk on a beach or have sex ever again. I haven't even started to talk about problems with navigating such a craft.
- OR -
Maybe the more intelligent forms of life have learnt to be efficient that they do not need to migrate to new planets. Maybe they don't reproduce as frequently as we do. Maybe life evolves to a point where it cannot die or give birth.
- OR -
Maybe the other life forms exist in other dimentions?
- OR -
Maybe the other life forms are so tiny that they will take a long time to inhabit the whole universe (or maybe they have inhabitted the whole universe already!?)
LOL.
Feel free to add to this list.
Call it the Anti Fermi Paradox...
hehe
I do want to backpedal firmly from one thing I said... something to the effect of "we'll be able to do anything we can imagine".
I do not in the least mean to say we can break physical law... I don't believe it is possible send information or matter faster than light, break the laws of thermodynamics, or violate conservation of charge, quantum color, strangeness, momentum, etc.
What I really mean to say is that it seems likely that a civilization 1000 years more advanced than us can configure matter to its liking, and in essence if not in fact convert matter to energy at will. And I think the only cost limitation on that is essentially the cost of the matter & energy involved.
What is possible within those limitations, taken with a good imagination, is staggering.
I'll second that fine thought.
;-)
Then again, even cockroaches can't get to another planet (without our help).
I think your analysis is quite correct. While there will always remain some vulnerability to become extinct, I think we're doing better then any mammal on this Earth. In fact seen the ecological niches we inhabit on this planet, and the fact we'll be reaching the 7 billion mark, we're doing better (in an evolutionary sense) then almost all other living things, (excluding insects and microbes and such, of course). The latter are the real survivalists of this world, of course: even we can't go without them.
That said, when looking at the more 'big' animals, we're pretty much at the top. Include our potential to actually go and colonise other planets, and we're actually quite something special, since no animal could do that before us. Compared to that, the shark is, indeed, much more vulnerable. Everything that really whipes out the entire human race is likely to whipe out the sharks too, IMHO - but the reverse can't be said. This becomes even more true if humans can hold their ground on another planet.
That said, our intelligence doesn't really mean it is an advantage per sé, evolutionary wise. If it was really such a huge advantage regardless of the ecological niche to be filled, it is difficult to understand why it hasn't popped up more in the hundreds of millions of years in our planets' history. Greater speed, sharper claws, poison, camouflage, flight... all these things have had miriads of recurrent examples troughout different species and times... but there is no such indication of intelligence.
While we have the tendency to think inteeligence is the summon of evolutionary advantage, I think this is a biased view. It is true that, in the long term certainly, it gives us a clear advantage, but it might well be, that it is a short-term disadvantage (geologically speaking, that is). For instance, intelligence is all good and well, but it requires a considerable amount of energy, solely devoted to the brains. This energy must come from somewhere, and since the intake of food has it's limits, an organism can't specialise in a dozen things at once. We have no claws, no poison, no great speed, etc. In fact, without our brains (and the tools they create) we wouldn't last long; we're actually fairly puny creatures, physically surpassed in almost any other sense by a myriad of animals.
So, the energy put in our brains must compensate for that...but it's far from sure whether it does this as a given. For the most part of our evolution as a human (talking about the before-homo-sapiens-neanderthalis period) we didn't actually did so good. For millenia our tools were very modest and could hardly rival with what other animals had from mother nature. We weren't much more then a group of 'animals' on the fringe of an ecological niche, probably living like scavengers. The fact that we've survived long enough to let our brains evolve enough so that our tools were becomming a definitive advantage from an evolutionary sense of stance, is mostly luck, really.
In fact, it was luck: recent genetic research has demonstrated that even relatively recently (homo sapiens sapiens era; our tools were already much better) our gene-pool had decreased extensively. Speculations are, it was caused by the climatic changes of a supervulcano 70.000 years ago, but whatever the cause was, it shows that our survival was far from certain, even though we'd evolved sentience. If it had been a little bit worse, our species would have ended right there and then, and we wouldn't be talking to eachother now. The evolutionary advantages of intelligence wouldn't even have come up.
However, our current level of technology and tool making has developped so rapidly that, by now, it has become a huge advantage, no doubt. Once humans start exploring and colonising other planets, it's difficult to imagine a disaster which would whipe out the human race: it might be possible, but there
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"More and more women are hooking up with 'geeks' now."
Warning! With outrageous claims like that you are in danger of having your Nerd-Licence revoked!
Please stop this hideous and vile indoctrination which might create severe cases of false hope for all us slashdotters!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Good point (and funny too).
One might postulate, however, that life itself has the tendency to cover all possible niches in some way or form (and thus, colonise new habitats). This can be observed for myriads of species that have colonised myriads of habitats - even extremely harsh ones - on Earth.
Space can be viewed as another niche, but only reachable by intelligent life. If so, and if intelligent life follows the tendency of life in general, it might not be farfetched to argue that intelligent life will colonise other planets.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The parent poster is actually right; it's a matter of willing, not of being able too. You don't need rockets and satelites or charter a plane to determine that the Earth is round. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes .
I assure you, being 240 BC, that Ancient Greek didn't have a rocket or an airplane neither.
If he could do it more then 2000 years ago, you can too, if you are willing to make the trouble.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Well, darn, reading your post now and... I could have spared me my post ( http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223140 &cid=18165750 )!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Yes, but...wouldn't that require, like... 2 Nvidia Geforce 12753600 ZZX's in SLI to be able to simulate our universe with such a decent framerate?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---