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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 ----
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.
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.)
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.
Think 20 million years. Or 200. Or billions, even. 10,000 years is not being dramatically ahead, that's being barely older than we are.
Consider the enormous timescale of evolution. Earth has existed for about 4.6 billion years. Compared to that, a few million years is nothing. What if the meteor that killed the dinosaurs had arrived a few million years earlier? Or later? Why did evolution take a billion years to get cells past the prokariotic stage? Could that have happened a few million years faster? Or is that step so unlikely that most planets never make it?
Furthermore, consider the age of the universe. The universe is about 3 times as old as the earth. Why couldn't an earth-like planet have appeared 5 or 6 billion years ago? There are good reasons why such a planet can't have appeared 14 billion years ago, but what about 7? That'd give any civilisation arrising on that planet an immediate 2 billion year headstart on us.
Is that enough to conquer the galaxy? If it isn't, nothing is.
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?
I agree with this parent post. It's pretty silly to assume that "if space faring civilizations exist, they should have colonized the ENTIRE galaxy by now." What about evolution time? Time to develop technology? Time to establish colonies? etc etc etc.
Actually, the Fermi Paradox takes all that into consideration. The time to colonize the galaxy, once a species has become space faring is minuscule in comparison to evolution. The paradox is based on the idea that the space faring civilization will colonize the galaxy before other species have a chance to evolve and the probability of two space faring civilizations existing at the same time is incredibly low.
If another civilization were to have started colonizing the galaxy, it's unlikely it would have been in the time periods you point out, 10,000, 20,000 years ago. It's more likely they would have begun tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, and yes, that is enough time to colonize the entire galaxy.
The Earth is believed to be about 4.6 billion years old. Life emerged in the first few hundred million years, probably around 4 billion years ago. Multicellular life sprung up around 1 billion years ago. Mammals have been around for about 200 million years. Homosapiens started out, probably around 200 million years ago. Now, let's say that instead of taking 3 billion years to go from single cell to multi-cell, it only took 2.5 billion years. That's a 500 million year head start. And there's no reason to think that's impossible. It's believed that the evolution of multi-cell was likely a fluke and not necessarily a forgone conclusion, largely because it took so long to show up. So that "fluke" could have probably happened any time after single-celled life began (well, any time after the first few hundred million years of it, at least).
Also, intelligence isn't necessarily a forgone conclusion of evolution. Dinosaurs had a lot more time to evolve than we have and they never developed our kind of intelligence. So let's say an animal in the dinosaur period had developed intelligence. That was over 65 million years ago. Plenty of time to colonize the galaxy.
The time to colonize the galaxy would, with only modest technological advancement from where we are now, would probably be a few million years. A very thin line on the timeline of evolution.
Woops, meant 200 thousand years ago, not 200 million years ago, for humans. My bad.
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.
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!
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.
Unless it is their goal not to disturb? A civilization sufficiently advanced that they're going around inspecting and cataloging life around the universe is almost certainly sufficiently advanced to hide their presence from the subjects they're studying.
So after reading through a bit of the comments to this article I gather that the collective wisdom of slashdot thinks that the state of extra-terrestrial life basically looks like some combination of Star Trek's Prime Directive, Babylon 5/ SG1's elder races, and Might and Magic's this colony forgot about technology motif.
I don't know why that surprises me...
Seriously, SciFi has so many holes in it that become quite obvious even as the story plays out, we shouldn't be extending out fiction to the universe.
If there is extra terrestrial life capable of FTL travel, wouldn't it stand to reason that it would put out colonies? Wouldn't it become successful by gathering resources when and where it can? Wouldn't we be able to spot either that or pick up their communications by now if it had ever happened within a reasonable distance of us? I can think of no reason why advanced ETs would bother to try to shield us younger species, it just doesn't make sense, unless you're looking for a plot device for a long running TV series.
The whole elder younger races thing, is even sillier, if there had been hundreds or thousands of apex species maybe we wouldn't know everything about all of them, but wouldn't it make sense that if there are multiple species in contact with each other eventually younger species will figure out the tech of the older ones, build on it and they will advance together? It seems unlikely to me that any species will have passed its prime keeping its technology secret, to the point that a younger race would be unable to reverse engineer it, so that the elder race is viewed as mystical.
Finally, I think that far-flung colonies forgetting about technology and regressing is possibly the most plausible, doesn't it also stand to reason that if we are such a colony we know enough about our planet that we'd be able to detect and "advanced tech" from our distant past?
I think the possibility that another poster mentioned, that we're just not in a sweet spot of galactic geography makes sense. If the c speed limit holds, any real colonization is likely to happen somewhat closer to the galactic center where interstellar distances are more manageable.
OTOH if the c speed limit doesn't hold, then I agree with Fermi, we really should have seen some ET life by now.
You are assuming we would recognize any evidence of extra terrestrials as such. If advanced ETs exist, we do not know by what means they communicate, travel, their preferred habitats, what resources are of value to them and can only guess what indicators we should look for. If there was an exact duplicate of the present-day Earth with humans and all a mere 3 LY away we'd still have a difficult time finding each other. We give off stronger radio emissions than our star ought to, but it's hard to make sense of any of those signals at such a distance--Arecibo probably isn't sensitive enough to pick out omnidirectional TV and radio signals and with more and more of our communications going digital or over wires, we're getting quieter. We'd probably have to send a powerful, focused and deliberate signal when our counterparts are actually listening to our part of the sky to get noticed. Maybe a space telescope could catch the earth transiting the sun clearly enough to pick out the emission lines of free Oxygen in our atmosphere--a strong indicator of life, but even that's exceedingly difficult and no guarantee. Basically, we're pretty deaf & blind and have little clue what we're supposed to be looking for anyway.
Our galaxy might be teeming with life, it may have even attempted to communicate with us many many times, but with our present ability to observe the universe around us, we very likely wouldn't have noticed.