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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."
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?
The dinosaurs seem to demonstrate the opposite: that life can survive a series of extinction events while keeping genetic lines fairly intact.
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.
Well, it's a population pressure thing. If there is no limit to your expansion, you'll expand to your limit.
Not that I don't think Fermi is full of it. All the "There can be no intelligent life if they haven't already a) been found by us or b) taken over the galaxy, theories are pretty foolish. There could be intelligent life inside 10 light years from us, and we wouldn't know it now; hell, we could be living on a planet seeded with life by an advanced society and we wouldn't know it...Maybe the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer. =P
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Oh for the love of god this is slashdot- nitpicking on casually slung out ideas is really stupid and pointless.
If you want to discuss and explore my assertion then hit the meat of my point-
Regardless of how advanced ANY civilization gets, it will be limited by POLITICS and the SPEED of LIGHT from ever colonizing outside it's native star system.
I picked 4 or 5 LY because we have exactly one star system in that range and last I heard, it is probably not habitable.
I was attacking two underlying assumption:
That all cultures will be prevented by politics from doing really big projects.
That it is absolutely impossible to break the speed of light (despite a lot of wishful thinking).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Extremely unlikely also means it's possible. We might very well be the first intelligent life to emerge in this galaxy. We might be the first in the universe. Extremely unlikely doesn't mean impossible. If we are, God help the younger species; the humans are coming.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
They've had 10 billion years to visit us. The magnitude of that amount of time is staggering. Consider how far we've come in the last few hundred years. Consider how far along we'll be in a thousand years. Now consider that the universe is a million times older than that.
Even if it takes a thousand years to build a ship to colonize our nearest star, hypothetical aliens may have had enough time to do that enough times to colonize the whole galaxy.
That's the Fermi paradox. If space travel is possible, then the time and scale of the universe is so huge that it would have been done millions of times by now. Hence, space travel is impossible or no aliens exist but us.
Example: say Fnord. If you were the only person in the universe, then you would be the first person to ever say Fnord. However, there are billions of people on earth, and billions more have come and gone. So Fnord has been said many, many, many times. If "Fnord" could spread like a disease, then by now everyone would say "Fnord"... I think I just screwed up my analogy.
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
:-). However, I'm not so naive as to limit an infinite God to a single planet, with a single intelligent species. There is nothing in the Bible that states that man is alone in the universe.
That's like saying "You have to attend Star Trek conventions and speak Klingon to believe in intelligent life outside our solar system". Just as there are whacked out "Creationists" who believe the Earth was created in 6 24-hr periods, there are whacked out groups that believe in extraterrestrial life. Need I bring up Xenu or that cult wearing Nike's that castrated themselves and committed suicide thinking a comet was the "mother ship"?. There are whack jobs in any belief system.
Why do you consider Creationism and common sense to be mutually exclusive? I believe in God, which means I have to accept that "God created the heavens and the earth" (in that order
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
As far as I remember, the universe *could* last forever... It's kind of another paradox, but it seems it won't collapse....
Well, even by the theory that says the universe will expand forever, any civilization that survived along with it would need to figure out how to survive
I'm having a hard time imagining a civilization managing to last until the time when the universe consists entirely of sparsely scattered electon-positron pairs slowly circling each other...
They've had 10 billion years to visit us.
Sure, if you are only looking for life. If you are looking for intelligent life, the chances are much smaller.
If they were here in the first 99% of those 10 billion years, they would have missed us. We may be marked as a "potential revisit" but the likelihood of any existing lifeforms knowing that we are here is very small. The likelihood of us knowing that THEY are around is even smaller.
If the number of potentially viable planets is of any meaningful size, we could be one of a billion planets out there that they plan to eventually come back to.
They've actually had about 50,000 years to visit us, less if you only want to count "recorded history". Indeed, any visits done 50,000 years ago would have been to a group of "intelligent" primates who, in all probability, would have had great difficulty in having the contextual skills needed to show intelligence to the visitors.
So, Fermi's paradox is that something impossible is expected of aliens civilizations, that we have no way to tell has happened. And this is taken seriously, why?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sure, but they could also have colonized the whole galaxy, then devolved and died off in the same period. Or they could just have skipped us because they like metal-rich planets in the liquid water zone with an atmosphere that's primarily methane, or any number of possible scenarios.
The point is, unless they set up an "Alien Burger" on the moon with a sign forty miles on a side, we'd never know they were around. Omni-directional radio of terrestrial origin has very little chance of ever being received in another solar system.
There is also the whole "What are the odds of intelligent live evolving at all?" question. It may be that, despite the age of the universe, the conditions for intelligent life took a long time to come together. Or that the process of evolution tends to take a while to produce a space faring civilization.
There are way too many variables to just automatically say, "If it were going to happen, it would already have happened."
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The dinosaurs didn't have technology.
Which is why they're not around any more.
Most likely, an asteroid the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs won't hit us for a million years or more.
And you base that estimate on what, exactly? Besides, even if you're correct on the odds, it's still a probability calculation -- one could hit us next week, we haven't tracked any but a fraction of a percent of the big rocks out there. But big rocks hitting the Earth aren't the only problem: a nearby gamma ray burster could do sufficient damage, and Eta Carinae (for one) is going to go "real soon now". Then there are the home-grown hazards -- runaway greenhouse, global thermonuclear war, the whole doomsday scenario litany. Perhaps none of them likely, but none of them in the "we don't need to worry about it for a million years" category either.
You really think we won't be able to do anything about it?
Not with attitudes like yours, we won't. We'll keep on figuring that it's some future generation's problem, or that there'll be plenty of warning. No doubt the occupants of Pompeii and Herculaneum felt the same way.
-- Alastair
why, oh WHY, would an intelligent being believe in the bible?
You're forgetting the age of the earth and the age of the universe. The universe was already over 10 billion years old before earth came into existence. Even if every other earth-like planet really needs at least 4.5 billion years too evolve an advanced civilisation, I still don't see why such a planet couldn't have formed one or two billion years before earth has.
The odds are really simple: if the evolution of intelligent civilisations is likely, then some of those must have a multi-million year headstart on us. Why aren't they here? The possibilities are limited:
Could be there's a few other options, but basically they all boil down to: we're incredibly lucky, or we're doomed.
By far the most successful animal species on Earth is the ant. They have exactly the type of determination that you describe. Imagine a technologically advanced species with similar attitude - every individual has a pre-determined role supporting the species plan of conquering every available planet. As for revolts and warfare, there is plenty of war between different ants. Hasn't prevented them from becoming the dominant type, on the order of 1/4 - 1/3 of the total animal biomass.
Hit a nerve, I see.
Yes. I take it personally when my belief system is used as a synonym for stupid, ignorant or "intellectually backwards". Just as, say a Muslim would takes it personally when Islam is equated to terrorism, or sci-fi fan is equated with "Trekker" (or Trekki, if forget which). I can usually take someone hitting a nerve in stride, but that nerve has been rubbed raw.
The reason I say you'd have to buy into Creationism, is because in Creationism, God created man, and no other species. That would be the only explanation for how an intelligent species could exist without there being the possibility for other intelligent species.
Well, there is nothing that says we are not the first intelligent species in the universe. I agree that it is HIGHLY unlikely, but someone has to be the first. Also don't assume that everyone who believes that God created man believes that God stopped there.
It's not that Creationists lack common sense. It's that they are so rabid about anything that might possibly in some world conceivably be a challenge to their beliefs, that they refuse to accept anything outside their little book. If they were open-minded at all, they wouldn't be pure Creationists. Just that simple.
There are "jihadis" that are even more rabid in their beliefs, but to say that all Muslims are equally closed minded is just as offensive as your argument. Don't get me wrong, I don't think you mean any disrespect, but stereotyping religions is no different using stereotypes as a basis for racism.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Yeah. But dude. The aliens would drown in the firmament. Its full of water.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I don't know if government is anti-procreation as much as people expectations of what a minimum lifestyle is. I suppose that counts as society.
I have a two-bedroom, one-bathroom post-war rambler, about 900 square foot foundation. The family that built this house raised six children in it in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, I am constantly asked when I will buy a bigger house because I have one child.
Could a "typical" family have six to ten children today? Certainly. Would they all have DVD players, attend summer soccer camp, college funds, and the latest fashions? No.
The problem with our being the first intelligent life in the galaxy is that there are a lot of other areas of science at stake in saying that humanity is in no way special. The scientists, therefore, refuse to admit that we could be the first. We are one of many, and not particularly close to being the first or the last.
They've had 10 billion years to visit us.
We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?
Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them. We've been listening for radio transmissions for a small number of decades; the fact that we haven't detected any alien transmissions just means that no transmissions which are strong enough for us to detect and are modulated in a way that we would notice have arrived at Earth during that very narrow window. Our entire recorded history is also very short compared to 10 billion years, and we'd be unlikely to know about any alien visits which could have occurred before we developed enough to pass on historical information to our children.
I just don't buy the premise that other civilizations are unlikely to exist simply because we haven't detected them yet. 10 billion years is a long time, but the universe (and even just this galaxy) is a big place, we haven't been around for very long, we've been actively looking for signs of other intelligent life for an extremely short amount of time, and it seems to me that even our ideas about what we should look for are tainted by the assumption that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be something like us and see the universe in a similar way.
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
Not necessarily. It might be that such as we could have happened somewhere else, but that in fact the probabilities required for intelligent life are so mind-bogglingly bad that it is only by an extremely small chance that it ever emerged anywhere for the entire life of the universe. It could be, for example, that for any given big bang there is only a 1/1,000,000 chance that intelligent life appears. It might then be that, even if we know that it exists (in the form of us), the chance of it having independently appeared elsewhere in the universe, ever, could still be on the order of 1/1,000,000.
Actually applying probability theory, we're in a very special situation: ordinarily, if you don't know the probability that something happens, and then you observe it to happen, this (roughly speaking) raises the "probable probability" of the event -- that is, if you didn't know if it was likely, and then it happens, you are now reasonable to suspect that it is at least somewhat likely.
The appearance of intelligent life is different: since this is a probabilistic "experiment" in which it is impossible to observe a negative result (i.e. the non-appearance of intelligent life anywhere in the universe), observing a positive result gives us no information, and we are right where we started, knowing nothing about the general probability of intelligent life except what we can infer from things that are very, very nearby (at least unless and until we can observe the rest of the galaxy/universe in more depth). It's like claiming a coin is likely to land heads-up because that's all you ever observe, when really you're just closing your eyes when it lands tails.
Now, on the other hand: if we were, ever, to encounter other intelligent life... then your statement holds, and probability theory kicks in to give us real information about the situation. As James P. Hogan wrote, "Two is an impossible number and cannot exist." Knowing intelligent life appeared once (that is, us) tells us nothing (except that the probability, whatever it is, is non-zero): but knowing it appeared twice tells us that it probably appeared uncountably many times. The probability works out differently because, in this case, it is possible to observe a negative result -- it is possible (though how probable, no one knows) that in all the history of humanity we will never encounter other intelligent life. Therefore, actually observing other intelligent life gives us quite a bit of information about how probable such life is...
I'm still not convinced by the Fermi "Paradox," however, since it seems to be extremely presumptuous about (1) how other intelligent life would behave, if it did exist, and (2) the fundamental engineering constraints imposed by the laws of physics. We know very little about either of these (though (2) isn't looking good in the short term... we'll see in a few thousand years, perhaps).
I am the man with no sig!
Who is to say that we have the contextual skills needed to show intelligence to other visitors? Perhaps we're passed by as not intelligent enough to bother with yet.
Or maybe they're just watching us until we develop and successfully test warp drive.
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...:-( )
Religion is different from race. Religion is consciously chose, race isn't. Religions, as a rule, mix common sense rules with some amount of logic-defying ridiculousness. The common sense rules hook people in, and then the illogic breaks their minds, rendering them incapable of making rational decisions on their own. They become cattle for the priestly class which profit from their mental enslavement. Religion teaches people that they are incapable of thinking for themselves, that they need a higher power, always speaking to them through a human intermediary, in order to know how to live correctly. Religion is a form of mass psychosis. It is no more a legitimate "belief system" than the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Almost by definition, a person has to mentally damaged in order to accept religion. This is no slight against any person so damaged, any more than a person damaged by a viral infection is at fault. It is not your fault that your mind was infected by an insidious mental virus that has damaged your ability to think, in order to make you better at spreading the virus to others. But you should not be respected for having the virus, and your attempts to pass the virus on to others should be stopped.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Here is why we do not see alien colonizers: Any civilization sufficiently advanced to discover Space Travel evolves its own GW Bush.
"We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?"
The argument requires the mediocrity principle which implies that if there are many other intelligent civilizations many of them would be far more advanced then we are. Given that it doesn't matter that we've had 10 billion years to visit them-we are the less advanced civilization.
"Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them."
Maybe, but if this is true you need to argue against one of the premises in the Fermi paradox. The argument itself seems to be valid, so you need to argue against it's soundness. Which premise is wrong then? It seems to follow logically from its premises.
Take it to be:
Premise: Mediocrity principle. Thus we are not special and as such if there are many civilizations many of them are more advanced then we are.
Premise: Life has a tendency to overcome scarcity and colonize new habitats.
Premise: Earth has been around long enough for a sufficiently advanced civilization to have densly colonized the area.
Assume for the sake of reductio ad absurdum that there are many other civilizations. Then because of the previous premises we would expect to see sufficient evidence of them in the galaxy. We do not see sufficient evidence of them in the galaxy, so we have a contradiction. So we conclude that there are not many other civilizations.
Notice this doesn't say there are NO other civilizations. This is merely an argument that if there are as many as people want to say there are (tons and tons of habited worlds with intelligent life beginning far before and far after ours) we should see them by now. Since we don't there can't be as many as people say. There could be some, just not a multitude.
The Fermi Paradox is that if they were here any time in the last 500 million years or so, thay would have colonised the place. Even if they subsequently went extinct here, it's hard to imagine a high-tech civilisation would not have left relics. Perhaps not every race feels the urge to do so, but Darwinism indicates that many will, and those will more than make up for any with qualms about pre-empting local intelligence from evolving.
Hallowed are the Ori
"Another possibility: aliens have visited us but have not revealed themselves to us. If their technology is so far superior to ours that it allows for space travel over great distances, it is also possible that they have managed to evade our attempts at detecting them."
The problem here is that science deals with what we can verify expirementally or empirically. Now you have a belief system that is untestable. You are out of the realm of science. Your question now is no different than "Is there a God?" because it is purely a product of your philosophy and not expirementally testable.
I see the Fermi paradox as saying that, the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are no other life forms, because if the basic tenents of science are true, then we should have seen them by now. If you want to argue about unrevealed aliens, you aren't arguing against Fermi, because he only wants to talk science, not philosophy.
I am aware of no such science. You may be talking about some type of politics.
I said this in another post, but I'll say it again. I think that Fermi here is giving a scientific argument. This means that expiremental verifiability is important. If you are saying that WE are the aliens, then evolutionary biology seems to have a body of evidence that we happened by chance, and to argue against it you need to posit some untestable hypothesis like (aliens struck the lighting into the primordial soup in just the right way as to create life that they knew would lead to intelligent beings eventually.) If you are saying that they are here but we can't detect them, then you are making claims also outside the realm of science since we have no expiremental faculty to test your hypothesis. Either way Fermi is going to say that he is arguing that if we take science to be the only way we humans can reliably come to know truth, then we must conclude that there is not a sufficient number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. It is merely an argument from what we can reliably believe given our science. Now you can say that this is a weak point in science's ability to come to truth. Which I would agree with you. But you need to recognize that this same hole also allows for arguments to the existence of God and a mariad of other things that cannot be verified by science but may be believed to be true none-the-less.
If you want to believe in undetectable aliens, then fine, but you have to realize that you are now asking a question of philosophy and not of science. Fermi is not saying that he has proven there can't be aliens, he is saying that the VERY BEST SCIENCE CAN DO, is tell us that there are countably few intelligent civilizations.
The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable.
There are at least two major issues with extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Let's assume that they evolved independently of us. It is often said that- by the sheer number of star systems- that there are likely to be a very large number of potentially life-supporting planets elsewhere in the universe. Let's assume that this is correct, and further that life may have evolved on a proportion of them.
Thus, the reasonable conclusion is that there is life "out there". Fair enough. Now; consider the timescale of the evolution of intelligent life on Earth. Very simple bacterial/single-cell type stuff for a large portion of that time. Moderately-intelligent creatures (dinosaurs, birds, etc...) evolving at slow speed for a very long time. Then- on the cliched "24-hour-evolutionary-scale"- mankind, the only organism likely to get anywhere near space-travel- appears at "five-to-midnight".
Furthermore, although Homo Sapiens in their modern form have been around for 200,000 years, most of the progress made towards space travel hasn't been even; it's been very skewed towards the present day. Technological sophistication has been growing ever-faster, on a pretty-much-exponential scale; how much modern technology has been developed in the past 100 years (a lot)- how fast has computer technology developed in the past *30* years (an incredible amount- by many orders of magnitude(*).
It doesn't take a genius to see where this is going. Around 10 years ago, I figured out by myself (**) that the next 1000 (if not closer to 100) years are likely to see more significant and fundamental changes in the nature of the human race than those since the dawn of human-like-intelligence.
My point being this:- Yes, there may be many planets/systems out there capable of evolving and supporting life, and possibly many with life as we speak. However, if we assume that the evolution of life (and technology) follows broadly the same pattern elsewhere as it does on Earth, (very slow for a very long time, then an incredibly sudden surge in intelligence/development), then...
Unless intelligent evolution (and its inevitable offshoot, technology) has independently reached the same "explosive" stage on one of those other worlds at *exactly* at the same time it has on earth (i.e. around the present day), they'll either be way behind us (at best.. primitive man? monkeys? horses?) or so far ahead of us that it's unlikely we can even speculate on where they'll have reached.
Remember; our recent technological evolution has been very sudden relative to the timescale of mankind's evolution. In turn, mankind's evolution has been a sudden event relative to the history of life on the planet.
So, the chances of independently-evolved life elsewhere having reached a comparable stage to us is similar to the chances of two independently-set 24-hour clocks purely coincidentally reading the same time to within a small fraction of a second. If they're more than a few seconds behind, they're nowhere near achieving space travel.... if they're more than a few seconds ahead, they're likely gods, as far as we're likely to be able to comprehend them.
That's assuming they haven't made a fatal mistake as they progress on their exponential evolutionary/technological curve. As with mankind, by the time they've developed space travel, it's likely that they'll be developing sciences and technologies that have the ability (if not used carefully and responsibly), to wipe them out completely. If they're anything like us, their technological evolution will not be matched by social evolution, and there will be great danger that around the time of (shortly before or after) developing space travel, that they'll put a foot wrong and wipe themselves out.
Back to the parent comment; if the alien intelligence has survived, and is more
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Evolution in some sense requires the mediocrity principle. Humans are merely chance events in the universe and we should expect to find many other similar intelligent species around the universe. If humans were the only such outcome of evolution then the chance involved gets smaller and smaller. The smaller the chance that evolution could have occurred the more surprised we should be for finding that it has occurred. The more surprised we are that it has occurred, the more it seems to make sense that some necessary being (we can call him "God") is conducting things, possibly in ways we don't understand.
For tradional materialistic evolution to work correctly we have to be just another chance occurrence with a "nothing to see here, move right along" sign tacked to our foreheads.
Presumes:
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Agreed, it was. However, you overlooked one factor: Slashdot moderators rarely display intelligence. Slashdot moderation is completely broken.
Treating your sally seriously, I think that religion is just a successful subset of general superstition; and when you broaden the question to why would superstition be successful within an intelligent civilization, the answer is that before science is understood by the entire population, beings will look in the wrong places for explanations because it is very easy to do so. I really think it is just as simple as that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So based on what you've said, you don't appear to be a Creationist. If you don't have any of these "whacked out" beliefs then you're not a Creationist, because they are truly and deeply wrapped around the post to the point that they're cutting off oxygen to their brains.Again, you're conflating a subgroup (the violent jihadist's) with the whole religion.
Creationists lack even a single ounce of critical thinking... Christians we should reserve judgement on.
Violent jihadists deserve scorn and a firm defensive posture... Muslims we should reserve judgement on.
However, I'll be completely honest and say that I'm pretty hostile to religion now that I've had a chance to really think through the issues. Fundamentally, the acceptance of mysticism as fact is the strongest negative influence for humanity, historically and in modern times. Being willing to set aside your own critical thinking and nonsense-filtering reason for what someone else wrote down in a book hundreds or thousands of years ago can have no good result for human happiness. And indeed, look at humanity's biggest problems around the globe (overpopulation, starvation, warlike states on the rampage) and look at where religious leaders stand in those debates (no condoms, no abortions, support for war as long as the leaders subscribe to their religion) and you'll see that we don't have to go back to the Spanish Inquisition to find religion as the leading sponsor of misery, death, and unhappiness.
Now, to separate you, the individual, from your religion. Sure. Like anyone living in the US, almost all of the people I meet and interact with believe in some flavor of irrational mysticism, and I still have fulfilling and productive relationships with them. Even in my family, it's a small group of us who truly don't buy into mystical beliefs, but I still love my sister and mom and everyone else in my family, no matter what their beliefs. Am I sad that they believe what they believe about death and salvation? Yes, a little bit. Am I sad that they support leaders who use their beliefs as justification for widespread destruction and hate? Yes, to the point of anger.
So I try not to think about that. Which works most of the time. Every once in a while, someone gets me into a conversation and gets really offended that I'm not a believer in their flavor of mysticism. These conversations usually end the friendship, so I try to avoid them if at all possible.
Regards,
Me (posting anonymously because this published statement may harm me in the future if my name is on it...)
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!
Actually, if they are living (or have automated monitors) within a radius of roughly 80 light years, they know we're here. We've been broadcasting our presence via radio waves for about that long now, and our broadcasts are unmistakably "intelligently designed".
I thought ID was not testable. Make up your minds. If we can find it in radio, then maybe we could also sift DNA for artificial clues. Unlikely, perhaps, but being unlikely and being not-testable are different issues. (And I am not talking about the Behe version of ID. Screw that.)
Table-ized A.I.
More seriously, broadcast radio is probably a blip
Quite possibly. However, radar seems likely to be around for a long time. Incredibly powerful signals, very easy to detect.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
You've got your logic all wrong. ID can be tested... but it can't be disproved. We could look at our DNA and see proof that we were created. We could see "tags" that never change, or a really consistent encoding or maybe (in the "fluff" that doesn't do anything) we could find a thousand digit of pi (in base 4). But since we don't see anything like that, it doesn't prove that we *weren't* designed.
The same can be said for radio. You could find, for example, that one small planet is emitting high powered radio signals outside the typical ones floating around space. You might find that these signals reside specifically in the small band that is useful for long range communication, as they can accept other signals on top of a consistent "carrier" signal. You might see that, in fact, there are evenly spaced carrier signals started emitting 80 years ago and haven't stopped since. And that is what anyone listening with the right instruments would hear.
On the other hand, you might not find any of those things. There could still be a signal, of course, but if it was made like a military signal... with frequency hopping and encryption and a high noise to signal ratio... there wouldn't be any of the obvious signs that it was intended to carry a signal.
What makes ID not a science is that it can't be *disproved* not that there is no possibility of proof. You can make a radio wave (or life form) and include a specific signature that proves it was designed, not random. Take my example of pi, for example. You can't look at a radio wave (or life form) that was *not* signed in some way and say "this wasn't created" and you *certainly* can't look at a life form or radio wave designed specifically to look like background radiation or evolved life and say for sure "this was not created."
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Actually, religion would probably be one of the only ways we get off this rock.
If you somehow made it a religious requirement to get to the mars and enough people bought it, they would get it done. A comparable number of independent thinkers would not be able to align themselves in a single direction to get it done. Religion does have a marvelous capacity to align the behavior of huge numbers of individuals.
Example: More katrina repair work has been done by religious organizations even tho the have less government money. I have religious friends who have spent a couple weeks now going and building houses. If I want to help, the only avenue I have is to join a religious group going to help. Government work is restricted to contractors and non-believers are too disorganized.
Example: Millions of people make it to mecca and the ganges river independently every year without any central organization other than their religion.
Religion allows people to do things that would otherwise be insane. So the right religion might get us to the stars.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't see how that follows. Improbable things happen all the time, what's one more? And the actual probability over time is pretty high...I mean, life exists practically everywhere on this planet...The most barren, desolate spots imaginable, they all have life. As far as we know, life is quite common in the universe...Intelligent life, maybe not.
.001%) to nearly every other unique snowflake in the fricking world to think that we might not be utterly special in the cosmos. But how often in nature do you see one of something?
Extrapolate from that to the whole universe, and say that it's probable that nowhere else in the whole universe has another species done what we have done?
I'm sure it irks the hell out of people who are wedded to the idea that they're little unique snowflakes that just happen to be genetically identical (+/-
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
No. If it turns out that the chance of intelligent life evolving is that low, the likelihood of some kind of überpowerful being capable of creating intelligent life on an arbitrary planet in the universe (A "god") evolving would be even lower.
Claiming that something must have created us would only move the problem one step farther away.
Even if we where created by a "god", that isn't an answer to the question how we came to exist. It only transforms the question into how that being came to exist.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Firstly, even as we know it, evolution (as a theory and "observed" phenomenon) applies only to our current earth environment; we simply have no evolutionary data available for other non-earth-like environments. It seems from current data that most environments in the universe are not earth-like. Therefore, any conclusions about the frequency of evolution in the universe as a whole are invalid, not only because we don't even know everything about evolution yet, but also because we know comparatively little about the universe, too.
Secondly, the "surprise" aspect is irrelevant to the liklihood of the existence of god. If there is a non-zero probability of an event occurring (in this case evolution of an intelligent civlisation other than human beings), the chance of encountering this event approaches 100% as the size of the environment tends towards infinity. So, if the universe is really damn big, we should be the opposite of surprised if and when we finally encounter another intelligent civilisation. The bigger the universe, the more inevitable such a discovery becomes.
On a side note, I'd also shrink at calling evolution (or humans) a chance occurrence. Gene mutation, debatably perhaps, but not evolution. Evolution in a colloquial sense is when a gene mutates - maybe by chance, maybe not- and results in an improved ability to survive in a particular environment. Therefore there is a certain deterministic aspect of evolution: if the mutation doesn't help the organism survive, significantly, it doesn't propagate significantly. If it does help, then it gets propagated, and the genetic evolution of populations occurs.
Even before genes existed in organisms, again, we know so little about what "sparked life", if it even ever sparked as such, that attributing to chance something that may in fact be entirely deterministic, even inevitable, would be illogical. Similarly, even if the process is deterministic, that doesn't mean there's a god. It might mean there's a fundamental law of the universe about which we're just not aware (yet).
Naturally, all of the above is a very simplistic description of very complex processes, but hey, I'm not evolutionary biologist.
Remember intelligence is only one way to solve the problem of keeping your species away from extinction.
Sharks are very dumb and have been doing just fine.
It is perfectly possible to imagine a universe full of life and yet with very few intelligent multi-planetary technological civilizations.
We are smart because we could not outrun (our outbite) our predators. We had to evolve other way.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
This, as someone else put it, is a xeno-psychology thing, not a technology one.
Colonization is likely only if the civilization visiting considers it desirable.
If you are a nearly immortal living spaceship (or an alien who was born in space - maybe bred to live in space) why would you want to settle down on a warm planet with a semi-corrosive atmosphere populated with semi-intelligent, self-replicating bags of jelly? It's not likely you would consider green grass under a blue sky something worth exploring.
To rephrase the question in human terms, why would you want to hop off your car in the middle of your trip to work, settle down and start a new life in a cold mud pond?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Consider how far we've come in the last few hundred years. Consider how far along we'll be in a thousand years.
Now consider the few thousand years _preceding_ the last few hundred.
The middle-ages was a few hundred years of stagnation, with some lost tech and knowledge in some areas, and some minor discoveries in other. It also was before the start of the scientific revoloution with systematic gathering, storage, duplication and disemmination of knowledge.
You could kill 99% of the population of USA, and give the remaining ones *nothing* other than the clothes they're wearing at the moment, wait 100 years, and have a civilization more advanced than many in the world today -- certainly nowhere even *near* stone-age level.
Meanwhile, dozens of species of shark are endangered, some of them critically so, mainly as a consequence of a very minor human activity. We'll need luck to avoid extinct shark-species in the next few decades, quite *without* any disasters.