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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.
"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
The universe wont last forever either.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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?
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.
You forgot choice zero:
0. Blow up the Earth and become extinct right now.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.)
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.
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.
Asimov's take on the subject: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question. htm is one excellent short story...
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 ....
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...
For some reason, they don't take orders from somebody on Slashdot with a 900k+ user ID.
Does that imply that there exists a person on Slashdot with a sufficiently low UID to give orders to NASA?
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!
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.
Quite true. The upper limit for how long we can stay on earth is about 1 billion years. After that the sun turns red giant and the earth is engulfed below the sun's surface.
One should point out that survival and colinization by our species does not require transport of any individuals. We need merely to transport DNA of our species (plus whatever companion plant and animal species desired). A space probe loaded with DNA might weigh only a gram or so.
If one hypothesizes that other intelligent species exist, then we need only to transmit our DNA code via radio. A receiving species could then directly sythesize humans from the code plus the easy-to-follow instructions included. If they did so however, I might question the quality of their intelligence. We need to fool them somehow by sending messages that entice them to "click here" despite better judgement. That's it! The future of mankind rests in the hands of spammers.
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!
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.
Here is why we do not see alien colonizers: Any civilization sufficiently advanced to discover Space Travel evolves its own GW Bush.
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
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
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.
software developed in Estonia...
Damn, why is this "cvs update" taking so long? Oh yeah, the project is hosted in Alpha Centauri.
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
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!