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The Fermi Paradox is Back
nettxzl writes ""Sentient Developments revisits the Fermi Paradox which is "the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) although the size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI's ought to exist." Sentient Development's blog post on the Fermi Paradox states that "a number of inter-disciplinary breakthroughs and insights have contributed to the Fermi Paradox gaining credence as an unsolved scientific problem" Amongst these are "(1)Improved quantification and conceptualization of our cosmological environment, (2) Improved understanding of planet formation, composition and the presence of habitable zones, (3) The discovery of extrasolar planets, (4) Confirmation of the rapid origination of life on Earth (5) Growing legitimacy of panspermia theories" and more ... So, where is everyone?"
o Far away in space
o Far away in time
o Far away in space and time
o Hollywood
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
I always put this thought experiment before people: If you had a spaceship that could instantly take you to anywhere in the universe, where would you go?
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets. Sure, with so vastly many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to see the haystack.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chemist, and something that cool will probably be worth the wait.
This is it folks, this planet is all there is. God only created life here on earth.
So we've used a few hundred years of technology for almost a hundred years to look for signs of life in a (nearly?) infinite universe and not found anything. Must mean its not there.
Considering the state of terrestrial intelligence, maybe any ETIs have realized that broadcasting attack coordinates into space may not be such a great idea?
lol: You see no door there!
and the Extra Terrestrial Intelligence that we know about has been covered up.
Where are the aliens? Wales. It's the perfect answer to every question.
Steven Hawking's comment (about how the history of advanced civilizations on Earth meeting less-developed civilizations has generally not gone well for the less-developed ones) would seem to apply here. Hopefully, any civilization advanced enough to not blow itself to pieces before developing interstellar transport capability would be reasonably benign -- but can we afford the risk? If a civilization has the wherewithal to visit other star systems, they are at the very least many years beyond where we are, both technologically and economically.
Maybe we should be glad if we're too insignificant to be noticed just yet. (We certainly don't have our act together, at any rate.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
We are a single piece of plankton in a very large ocean. It might take a while... -Ejay
Its not really a paradox if the intelligent life is smart enough to actively try to avoid our detection, and competent enough to succeed.
Anyone remember who first noted that the best evidence for intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't contacted us?
They set up shop on the far side of the moon and launch interstellar spaceflights from there. That's why. Didn't you see that in Star Trek IV when Kirk and the gang used the moon to hide their warp signature from the Vulcans as their ship headed off towards the sun to travel back to the future?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
...but they are way too smart to talk to strangers!
A fungus doesn't need to travel fast to eat your bread. Actually it doesn't travel at all and gets the job done after a few weeks. Space colonization is the same process on a larger scale.
The paradox is that if they have a few thousand or hundred of thousand year ahead of us, then they should have at least by probe or similarly conquered or explored this galaxy, or send a lot of radio signal. But we see nothing.
IMHO a simple way to resolve the paradox is that no species has the raw material or the scientific knowledge to ever send self reproducing probe to explore the galaxy. We might not be alone but we will never meet each other and stay in our small island of life.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
We've been unable to make our presence known by radio until less than 100 years ago.
We can get humans to the moon, but not to the next planet.
The universe is vast even compared to our oceans and we lose people in our oceans all the time. Why would we think a space probe would be noticed by someone?
Now, our technology will improve and some of the above statements may change rapidly. But, the chances of our using some of those technologies to destroy ourselves seem to be accelerating as well. Perhaps the missing part of the model is that other civilizations always blow themselves up within a few hundred years of their first communication attempts or steps off their planets.
We probably will.
I've heard it said that if you shrunk down the galaxy so that it was about a yard wide, the head of a pin would represent all the stars that we can see from Earth. Earth is such an infinitesimally small place in our galaxy, let alone our universe, that it seems pretty much impossible that any advanced life would notice our tiny planet. Shoot, we've only had radio technology since the 1940s! That means that any signal we've ever sent out from our planet is no farther than what, 70 light years from Earth? That's not even close to reaching that many stars. Even if other races set up something like SETI on their own planet and were actively looking for signals, it'd still be millions, or billions of years before ANY got to them.
Where is everyone? Avoiding us, Humans are not a very nice species, we do not play well with others...
SETI with radio signals is the most retarded thing I have ever heard of, it is guaranteed to fail. No INTELLIGENT life would attempt interstellar communication by radio. As soon as we grok that our chances of finding ETI will increase significantly.
reminds me of a quote Grissom had on CSI about aliens: "I am sure if there is something out there looking down on us from somewhere else in the universe, they're wise enough to stay away from us."
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Life is one thing, intelligent life on the other hand is very rare. In the billions of years life has existed on Earth, sentient being have been around for how long?
...
2-minutes to midnight ring a bell anyone?
sing along with me
The killers breed or the demons seed,
The glamour, the fortune, the pain,
Go to war again, blood is freedoms stain,
But dont you pray for my soul anymore.
2 minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom.
2 minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb.
The blind men shout let the creatures out
Well show the unbelievers
The napalm screams of human flames
Of a prime time belsen feast...yeah!
As the reasons for the carnage cut their meat and lick the gravy,
We oil the jaws of the war machine and feed it with our babies.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
I'm reminded of an argument put forth in Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God: If, once we reach a certain level of technological sophistication, it takes only hundreds or thousands of years to either annihilate ourselves or transfer our consciousness into a virtual world, what are the chances that any two types of intelligent life could exist contemporaneously anywhere in the universe, provided that a sufficiently intelligent species develops science and technology only after developing for several billion years?
We're not even confident that our social experiment will last right now. We've had 120 years or so of real technology -- and there's no guarantee that resource constraints, political strife, or any number of environmental factors won't return us to subsistence farming within a few more generations. The real question is, given not only the incredibly large size of the universe, but also the almost incomprehensibly-long timelines, what are the chances that two intelligent species will be concurrently intelligent, civilized, and looking for each other ... and furthermore, what is the chance that we are one of them (and at this very moment)?
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Assuming they're smart enough to create signals that we can detect, they can most likely detect ours too.
Complex life on this planet has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and yet it's only in the last hundred or so that we've been able to look out with anything more than enhancements of our natural senses. This implies that the odds of a second species being at exactly the same point tiny. Most likely, if they're sending things we can read, they got there a long way before us and are quite a bit smarter.
Assuming they're quite a bit smarter, one look at the crap our radiowaves are sharing with the universe - infomercials, reality TV and our politics/wars - and I'd imagine pretty much any higher civilization would be embarrassed enough about us to screen their signature and make damn sure those idiotic hairless apes don't go and screw their part of the galaxy up too.
So, the answer to the paradox: There's most likely higher intelligence out there. And, because it's higher, it's most likely embarrassed to hell and back by us and screening itself from us. Problem solved.
Any space-faring race that makes it here will be technologically advanced by far.
We're technologically advanced over all the other creatures here on Earth. We eat them.
--
BMO
Maybe they are out there, trying to communicate with us, but they're using MSN Messenger and have the same bad grammar as half of the other people who use it?
"hello earthling.we want to know you know about us.info is important!!!!!"
It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
The smarter a living thing gets, the more likely it is to do something stupid that kills all of them swords then guns then nuclear weapons then synthetic black holes and antigravity, etc. And less cognatively capable but well adapted animals can't build radio towers and spaceships so we'll have to go visit them instead of them visiting us
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
There are several other possibilities. We could find ETIs by:
For observing their effects on the galaxy, perhaps the ETIs make changes which are too small to detect on the scales we can currently resolve. Or maybe they don't need to make such changes to advance their society.
For observing their communications, perhaps their communications are too weak to reach us above the background noise, or they used broadcast communications only briefly in such power (and the time to detect those is past), and now use methods which are much less detectable (think quantum communications.)
For observing them directly, perhaps they are just too far away, or they don't travel beyond their own (possibly terraformed) starsystems.
Perhaps that the period of time in which we had to detect them was small because they made it to some singularity and no longer concern themselves with the same things we do. Maybe they have a massive machine mind now, and everyone 'lives' in that, working on more important problems. Maybe they don't need to consume vast quantites of resources now and so their effects can no longer be observed, and the limited window in which to observe them has passed.
And there are undoubtedly a lot of socio-political factors which we would have to consider - colonization of space is expensive, xenophobia, planet doesn't have the resources to support colonization. Perhaps terraforming as we have imagined it is largely impractical or maybe even impossible (at least for some species) and therefore they are stuck within a single solar system on life support. Maybe they don't have the will to do generation ships, or their biology is unsuited to the trip.
I can thing of TONS of reasons why we have not yet observed ETIs, even if the Universe is swarming with them. I'd very much like to believe we'll meet some someday, but I certainly don't see it happening in my lifetime, and I could easily see humans transcending into some form where such things are no longer of interest to them.
I always found it puzzling that the brightest minds seem to feel there's a fair percentage chance we'll find sign of extraterrestrial intelligence from radio waves. Granted, they're a lot more clever than me, so hopefully they have good reasons.
My view though...
Our civilization is in its technological infancy, and even we find radio rather slow and limiting. I can't imagine us leaving much of a radio footprint in another hundred years, especially not leaking it with omnidirectional broadcasting.
Imagining the same being the case of another civilization, we're trying to listen in on broadcasts from a time window of two hundred years or so, and we've been listening for a couple of decades. In a context where being off by a million years wouldn't be too bad, the odds strike me as fairly infinitesimal even if assuming thousands of civilizations located cosmically nearby.
Doesn't hurt to try, mind. It's not like we have a lot of other options open to us currently.
Now, think of it in a new way. Suppose you were a civilization that just developed space travel, much like where we are now. You have a galaxy around you with 400 billion stars, and that's a lot. It takes you 100,000 years at light speed to cross the galaxy, and that's a long time. However, you have 2 billion years to explore. I have no good grasp on where humans will be 2 billion years from now, but I am sure we will be pretty advanced. Now add to the mix that there are maybe 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 other advanced civilizations alongside with you, and you can see why we are wondering where everyone is. Oh, and there are a trillion or so other galaxies out there, so if you start to consider the possibility of intergalactice travel, you can even go futher with this.
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degreee celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either.
The truth is oil was discovered on the new planets. And they had a different religion. They will find us next.
Our radio emissions are a powerful repellent to intelligent life. Come on, if you tuned in to earth and heard all about Paris Hilton, Disco, or one of FDR's "fireside chats", wouldn't you just keep on going by?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We have not had electronics for very long. We have just become able to communicate across the planet at any kind of speed.
With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.)
That's the Sagan argument. Unfortunately, the fact that we exist tells us absolutely nothing about how probably intelligent life is or isn't (see: anthropic principle). Sagan's argument doesn't address the fundamental Fermi problem.
The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
True, but the amount of time that's passed until us showing up is also astronomically large. It only takes one race with an expansion desire to fill up the galaxy at sublight speeds around 1 to 10 million years (via geometric expansion). Even if it took 100 million years, that's still a blip in the life of the galaxy. At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating probes by now. By we've seen absolutely nothing.
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
>A fungus doesn't need to travel fast to eat your bread. Actually it doesn't travel at all and gets the job done after a few weeks. Space colonization is the same process on a larger scale.
I'm not sure how sending fungi into space to find alien bread to consume is going to be useful to anyone besides the fungi.
I found a video from these guys to be rather interesting, if not somewhat convincing: http://http//www.disclosureproject.org/ Video can be found here. Please, anybody with some web space, put up a mirror so that this nice little not for profit group doesn't get slashdotted off the web: http://www.netro.ca/disclosure/npccmenu.htm
So let's say YOU are the extra-terrestrial and you have overcome gigantic obstacles of technology related to getting from point A to point B in the universe; would you really expose yourself to a "civilization" (and I use the term loosely - so loosely in fact that it makes a French whore seem like a virgin) that murders it's own population for a fuel source that has no future in the space age?
Get real, if there are others out there it will be eons before they introduce themselves, unless by some unforeseen accident.
Hope is the currency of fools
the leader of the fifth invader force speaking to the commander in chief...
Answer here
"They're made out of meat, Sir."
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Note: About a month ago Lt. Walter Haut, who was the original press officer at Roswell who issued both the "we've got a crashed UFO" press release as well as the "Oh no, our bad, it's just a weather balloon" release, had his post-deathbed "confession" released, stating that indeed a craft, with bodies, did crash.
Haut confession
What I find very interesting about this is that when he was alive, Haut consistently denied that anything spectacular had occurred, and only after his death was this information released, as per his wishes. IMO that lends at least a certain level of credibility to the claims.
Perhaps it is unlikely, but I for one am not going to say there is no chance this "UFO thing" is for real, at least in a small number of cases.
Not only is space really big and our influence on it really small (so far), but the age of the universe is huge compared to the time we have been capable of making an impact which might be visible by ETI's looking for us. If we take earth history, with us humans in particular, as a measure of what is needed to get to a civilization that can be seen from another part of the universe then we might notice that it has only been very recent since shapes and development on or around earth might be visible and taken as a sign of intelligence present. Us humans have only been making an impact in the last couple of centuries (give or take a few 1000 years). So, relative to the age of the universe (13 odd billion years) we have barely started participating in the race of finding others. The big question is how long human civilization will last and continue to grow its influence on our cosmic surrounding in a way that will make it more and more likely to be picked up by ETI's. I find it hard to predict if we will even be here in the same shape and form a 1000 years from now (human singularity, natural or unnatural catastrophe). The distribution in time of when ETI's might have been able to show themselves might be the same. If there is only a visible window of a few 1000 years before a ETI civilization passes back into a state of non-visibleness then that significantly reduces our chance of finding any.
just a thought.
This inserts a factor of 1000years/16 billion into the probability calcs.
...they're off visiting all the other jillions of interesting sentients throughout the universe?
It seems to me in order for the "Fermi paradox" to be a problem, you've got to assume that the development of intelligent, spacefaring sentients is really, really, common.
Suppose, for example, we assume that we get found by someone detecting our radio broadcasts. According to this, the first commercial radio broadcast was in 1920. The wave-front from that broadcast is now a sphere ~43 light years in radius. According to this, the Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 light years.
Using a 2D (because I don't have the math or the data for a 3D) model: a disc of radius 43LY has area 43*43*pi = 5.8E3 LY^2. For the galaxy, A=50000*50000*pi = 7.8E9. So our broadcast sphere has covered 0.00007% of our own galaxy.
So even if there is another sentient spacefaring species out their zipping around in their FTL ships, they'd have to be looking really hard just to get down to the granularity necessary to look in our little corner of the galaxy.
And what if you assume the development of sentient life is unlikely? What if the nearest one is in, say, the LMC? What if FTL travel is impossible, or just really hard? We might never meet one.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
We're in your tubez, monitoring your p0rn!
I'm not sure you can really say that, given that current detection methods are really suited to finding larger planets that are not so suitable for life. What we have is an observational selection effect.
Indeed, as TFA notes, there is "something wrong with our thinking", or at least with that of the author.
First, interstellar colonization? Unlikely. It makes nice SF, but there's no good economic basis for it. A civilization that survives long enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else? The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent. (They're working on stellar engineering, of course, so there's no worry about their sun going nova.) Childish species who still imagine faster-than-light loopholes might dream of going swashbuckling across the galaxy, but grown-up races are content to follow more mature pursuits. TFA's claims about "intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats" are simply handwaving, generalizing from one species of half-bright monkeys into sweeping statements about all intelligent life.
Second, there's the question of signal detection. Contrary to popular belief, radio and TV transmissions probably couldn't be detected at interstellar ranges. We've only sent a handful of signals into space that are detectable at long ranges - and mostly that's content-free radar signals. Why do we assume others are more chatty than we are? I imagine a galaxy full of listeners, each waiting for someone else to start talking. Additionally, compression and encryption make signal indistinguishable from noise.
Third, recognition of "mega-engineering". TFA claims "we see no signs of their activities in space". How would we know? We assume a "natural" explanation for phenomena - as we should - but if we assume the existence of greatly advanced tech, who knows what we think of as "natural" and take for granted out there that's actually engineered?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Then who the hell is responsible for the mosquito?!
Even if there was proof of ETI our governments would cover it up. Is it really a paradox if we have no chance of obtaining proof?
The problem really is if they start out as we did with radio signals then they would be low powered for local use. Once they advance to space travel it's unlikely they'd be using radio type communications. There's either a narrow range of years, where we are now, where they might try to contact other races. Once they advance to interstellar space travel it's unlikely they'd be interested in tracking down far less advanced civilizations. Why broadcast radio signals hoping to hear back in ten thousand years from a far less advanced civilization? The only real hope is detecting radio signals that escaped into space but we don't have equipment sensitive enough to detect weak signals. Let's say there's a two hundred year window a race uses radio signals. Say over the last million years 100 races developed to the point of using radio within a 100 light years of us. Overlaps in two races in the zone would be rare and that's even assuming we had the equipment to detect the signals. But what about a million lightyears away? The signal would be that much weaker. The only hope really is a long term program with the intent to communicate with other races. We've yet to do that ourselves. We haven't had a civilization last ten thousand years so how likely is it going to be that we are still monitoring radio signals in ten thousand years? It's been a fight to keep SETI going for a few decades and it just monitors a fairly narrow range of signals in low noise areas of the spectrum.
Personally, I think there may well be more than a grain of truth in Calvin's Commentary: "The best proof that there is intelligent life out there is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
For observing their effects on the galaxy, perhaps the ETIs make changes which are too small to detect on the scales we can currently resolve. Or maybe they don't need to make such changes to advance their society.
Or may be the effects are too large... Hey look, the galaxies are running away from each other, aren't they supposed to slow down by the mutual gravitational effects?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
One piece of wild speculation on why we haven't accidentally picked up any TV or radio broadcasts from ET...
At this point in time TV and radio is rapidly being usurped by interactive media, most of which currently travels along cables and would of course be undetectable from other planets. As for wireless internet, the power of a wireless LAN router is obviously far less strong than say a TV signal broadcast from a TV tower. And future wireless broadband signals would presumably also be local and low-powered, because it's more efficient that way. (Guesswork, of course).
Of course traditional high-powered TV and radio broadcasts aren't dead yet, but in say 100 years it's pretty easy to imagine that they they might be. (Or not -- I know this is all speculation)
So, IF (huge if) other civilisations follwed this path, this might be a possible reason why we don't see or hear their broadcasts -- because like us their high-powered broadcast media only existed for a short time, and were soon replaced by more efficient low-powered interactive media
All wildly speculative I know.
they don't want to catch "Democracy"... they've seen how it gets forced onto others who don't want it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
I'm still trying to decide if this is even likely to happen.
For example, why don't we work on visiting the Moon or asteroids or other planets that are rich in minerals we need, mine them, and ship them back to Earth? Of course, it's because it's not practical to do so -- the money/energy consumed by shipping them to Earth vastly outweighs what we'd gain by having them.
Shipping people around the universe poses the same problem. To make it practical, you either need to bring a small group back (which you really can't do across light-years) or send a large colony one-way. To do THAT, you need to be fairly certain they've got a good place to land, and completely certain they've got a comfortable ship to ride in. A ship large enough to carry an entire colony AND provide the food, oxygen, and sanity they'll need on the way would probably mean hollowing out an asteroid.
It's not a question of technology to send people across the stars, nearly as much as it is a question of making the trip worthwhile. I don't think there's any technology in existence according to the known laws of physics that could motivate any life-form to colonize other planets while their home planet was still habitable.
The same processes that led to our "advanced" evolution, like a strong tendency to eat competitors or in some way take their accumulated energy for our own use, will ultimately result in our demise. Currently humans seem to have evolved along two parallel paths: as predators, for example Dick Cheney or George W. Bush, who individually use all the resources they can take; and as "altruists" who join with others to work for common goals (probably through a built-in mechanism such as empathy). The latter mechanism has a future, the former does not.
Try to imagine any mechanism besides predation that can lead to evolutionary advances and you will see that it is very difficult. Thus the answer to the Fermi Paradox may simply be that all the other experiments in evolution have already died out as the logical result of exactly the same process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_mach ine
I say someone in the past created Self-replicating machines and they are not destroying all life in the Milky Way.
They have probably heard our radio broadcasts and are on the way already to wipe us out.
But, Then I recently read this book Von Neumann's War.
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416520759/14 16520759.htm?blurb
Tim S
The amount of time that's passed becomes less relevant if life requires certain physical conditions that didn't exist or existed far less frequently early on in the universe. Perhaps life requires certain concentrations of heavy metals. Maybe we're one of the first.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If it's true that Hitler's speech was the first TV-broadcast using sattelites, I don't think the 'aliens' would like to come and pay us a visit.
Next to that, life on Earth is fairly unique. We have the exact circumstances that are necessary to have carbon-based extravagant life on any planet. We are the perfect distance from the sun, have the perfect atmosphere even the perfect combination of chemicals and gasses. Well, of course we are committing suicide by abusing this perfect balance and screwing it all up, but I doubt there are many planets that have the conditions to sustain bacteria, let alone intelligent creatures that come out on the surface to build stuff and launch themselves into space.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
can anyone give me an answer to the following question-
given that electromagnetic signals:
-travel at the speed of light
-are useful for communication
-are quite easy to pick up and analyse en masse
-keep going indefinitely
why is it that we haven't found evidence for one single civilisation?
is it presuming too much about other lifeforms to expect that at least one, out of the millions of civilisations that must be there, at some stage of its development, may have used radio waves?
i don't know enough about it, but my sympathies lie with the idea that while the universe may well be teeming with life, approximately 40,000 years ago something very special happened on earth . call it the "great leap forward" or whatever, but somehow, the sudden explosion of sophisticated language and the thought that it enabled (and vice versa), allowed for the incredibly rapid development of the civilisation that we see around us today.
its worth considering that life of our type may well be a very rare event. perhaps even unique in the universe.
The Rare Earth Hypothesis is that microbial life is common, complex life is uncommon and 'intelligent' life is unique to earth.
It usually takes a second-generation solar system to create a planetary disk with enough heavy elements to form rocky earth-like planets with iron cores (thus generating a magnetic field that can shield the planet's biosphere from solar radiation). Heavy elements form through atomic fusion deep inside the the core of decent-sized main-sequence stars, and are probably only released through supernova-scale events.
:P
The known universe is only 15 billion years old. Our sun is only halfway through its (at least second, maybe more) 10 billion year lifecycle. So chances are we're still fairly early to the party.
Once conditions were right on Earth, it took life only about 2 million years to develop to where we are now. We've only been pumping out radio signals for about a century. We're 8500 light years from the center of the Milky Way, so news of our existence hasn't even reached most of our own galaxy yet.
From the bits I've read about what we know about physics, quantum tunneling and wormholes are the only prospects we have for faster-than-light communication and/or travel. And both of them pretty much rely on having the entangled particles or artificial wormhole endpoints moved to separate locations at sub-light speeds. So I think the prospects are dim for finding ways to survey a significant part of our galaxy and the rest of the universe for our contemporaries. We'll just have to hunker down and try to survive for the long haul, and try not to destroy ourselves or our planet or fail to colonize other planets before this one goes out on its own. Eventually we'll find something out there, and hopefully they'll have the decency not to thwack us
Intelligent people know that the smartest guy in the room is the one who knows when to shut up, particularly when the conversation gets especially technical and poly-syllabic. Maybe that's the conventional wisdom among all those probable intelligent races out there, too. Look, does broadcasting "I Love Lucy" reruns and "We come in peace" boilerplate make us look all that sharp? I figure it makes us look weak, just the sort of planet you'd want to invade. Think about that.
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degrees Celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either.
While that 20 light year away planet might not be the answer, it has interesting possibilities if we (mankind) destroy our planet as we grow with technology but do not grow as fast politically. We should go... and perhaps find intelligence had a war that wiped out intelligence. Could be biological, nuclear or other, but many growing civilization no doubt got major set backs by war.
I for one would think it would be good if one came for a visit...so we realize how small we really are.
That is all true --- but you're not going to find intelligent life on their home planets. You're going to meet explorers looking at the same sights you are.
Given a Perfect(TM) spacecraft, there are a relatively small number of Interesting Things in the universe --- there are only about 12000 known quasars, for example, and I'm sure there are other, rarer Interesting Things to take a look at. Closer to home, space-going travellers in Milky Way Galaxy will tend to congregate at the black hole at Galactic Centre if you want to meet locals. And, naturally, everywhere you go you leave bouys saying hello and inviting people to meet up and some arbitrary location. Eventually you're going to run into someone.
Also, bear in mind that a Perfect(TM) spacecraft drive also implies that a Perfect(TM) communications system could be possible... you may just be able to turn on the hyper-radio and ask if there's anyone out there who wants a drink.
(My pet hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox is that there's lots of people out there, but they're not talking on the same system that we are. Long-distance communication using electromagnetic waves sucks, they're expensive, unreliable and slow. Let's suggest that there's something better available once technology gets good enough --- it doesn't matter how much better, just that it'll be the preferred mechanism once you discover it. Let's call this Q waves. The window where a civilisation knows about EM waves but doesn't know about Q waves is likely to be quite small, on the order of a hundred years or so. Given how slow EM waves are, by the time you receive a message that's been sent using EM waves, the sender's probably not using them any more... so given that you're using the Q spectrum for your own communications anyway, why bother even listening on the EM spectrum?
This neatly explains why we haven't been able to pick up an EM sources in the sky; there aren't any. But there will be plenty of Q sources, and if any of those are close enough and interested enough to have picked up our own EM emissions, they'll be patiently waiting for us to build Q receivers so we can hear their replies.
Incidentally, in the real world, high-frequency gravity waves might make a good candidate for Q waves. We know practically nothing about the gravitational spectrum, but while gravity waves propagate at c, they don't get blocked by interstellar dust, and there's a good chance that there aren't very many natural sources of high-frequency gravitational waves to produce interference. That makes them a considerable improvement over EM waves. Now all we need to do is to find a way of sending and receiving them...)
Simple: they're watching the monkeys play with their fireworks. Safely from cloaked vessels.
Steven Baxter in his novel "Space" presented the idea of the solar system being thick with dozens of examples of massive alien resource extraction projects - that there was tonnes of evidence of alien life right here in our own solar system, but we never thought to look for it. It's a good piece of hard SF, but he raises a good point - the evidence was right there, but we didn't know it was evidence. I'm not suggesting that that's the case IRL, but it's food for thought.
People make jokes (or serious observations) about "Why would they even want to talk to us?" but the truth is it's probably more like, why bother coming all the way over here unless they need something. Maybe not everyone wants to talk, or they don't bother devoting huge resources to building transmitters for the same reason we don't - they have better things to allocate resources to. Space could be teeming with life, there could advanced civilizations within 20 light years of here, but we haven't built massive laser or radio systems to contact them, why should we assume that they will. Hell, we can't even track all the near earth asteroids in space, you could fly a ship inside the lunar orbit and photograph the earth and how would we possibly know? Unless we happened to be aiming the right telescope at the right spot at the right time, they could be flying all over the place, and as long as they're not using Orion engines, we'd never know.
I think that Fermi's paradox isn't a paradox at all. If we had an Apollo scale program specifically dedicated to searching for evidence of alien life, searching the skys, conducting archeology on the moon, Mars and Venus etc, we'd find the evidence if it were there. If we devoted HUGE resources to finding and contacting alien life, we probably would if it were there to contact. But we don't because we need to eat and most people would prefer to have an XBox 360 than spend their money ensuring humanity has first contact in the next 50 generations. And the aliens are probably the exact same. Until there's an intelligent race in the universe that decides it's number 1 priority is to find and contact other aliens, we'll probably all just wonder about it and get back to what we've categorized as more important.
I think that there's probably no paradox, it's just that no one out there thinks it's important enough to bother.
Oh my god, it all makes so much sense now. The scientologists were right.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Hopefully, any civilization advanced enough to not blow itself to pieces before developing interstellar transport capability would be reasonably benign ...
Why would showing restraint with respect to interactions with your own species mean you would show similar restraint when interacting with other species? Wolves can show much restraint to other wolves, but little to other species.
Evolution favors a combination of aggressiveness and intelligence. Losing either quality will make you vulnerable to those who have not lost either. Consider pacifism. Pacifism only works when isolated or when there are non-pacifists who protect the pacifists. Humans are probably either unique or one of many intelligent species. Given many intelligent species, some may have become pacifist in isolation, but all will not. Those who retain some aggression will dominate in the long term. The more civilizations that have made contact, the less likely we are to meet pacifists. Given that our first contact is also likely to be one of many I'd so the odds of your optimistic scenario are not good.
"I have no good grasp on where humans will be 2 billion years from now, but I am sure we will be pretty advanced." ...or dead.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
How does someone detect our Radio broadcasts?
Our 2kW transmitter towers are not going to be heard over the interstellar air waves, there just isn't enough energy. I've no idea where this myth comes from that Aliens can somehow pick up our radio emissions - if they're lucky, they may receive a few photons here and there, not enough for them to determine if it is coherent.
Only high-energy, directed transmissions are likely, perhaps Twisted Light, and if we're not sending something like that, what makes you think the aliens are?
(bit of trolling but a point non-the-less) I love how most everyone 'round here disbelieves in God because there is "no evidence", but with ETs it's just that we don't have the technology to detect them. If you can't measure it, test it, or prove it it doesnt exist right?
Just trying to keep you all consistent.
We have limited understanding of what is going on in the universe. We still do not have a grand unified theory, and we are still puzzled by things like quantum entanglement. I do not think we should say there is a paradox unless we can really understand what goes on in the universe.
They are all in freezer #4, hanger 12 in area 51. Go to the front gate and insist that they let you in. Don't be fooled by the 'go away or we will shoot you' rhetoric, it is just a bluff.
-Charlie
The Fermi paradox is just proof that there are much better forms of communication technology waiting to be discovered. Ansible users are at a stage where it probably doesn't occur to them that a culture worth talking to would use electromagnetic radiation as a communications carrier.
SoupIsGood Food
So self important, so smart, and witty, these humans. They'll be just adorable as friends!
Why, they shoot, rob, kill, maim, pollute, blow up infidels, abuse each other incessantly, lie, cheat, steal, and so on.
Delightful little interplanetary friends, these people on the third rock from the sun.
Hey: any evolved civilzation with the brains to travel at C will take one look at us, and fly on by. And I wouldn't blame them a bit. We're barely out of the stone ages. Evolving, yes, but see the above for great reasons to make the Fermi Paradox both laughable and embarrrassing.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Seriously. It takes several minutes round trip to get a signal to Mars - nevermind Saturn or the Pioneer probes. Any signal we pick up would have been sent tens - if not hundreds, or thousands - of years after it was sent. Our earliest signals traffic - if you could even pick it up that far distant - is less than a hundred light years out. So anything we're technologically capable of picking up with our present equipment will have been transmitted by a civilization that is now centuries ahead of us - assuming they're still around.
Space is big. Radio (the human-produced signal range) is teeny. Really, really, ridiculously teeny. A moderately close neighbor - say, 200ly out - at the same technology level could be transmitting right at us and we won't pick it up until the 23rd century.
Talk about latency.
The theory of evolution doesn't make any claims about how likely random mutation and natural selection are to produce intelligent life. It claims that is what happened in this single case of life on Earth.
The Universe Song
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
and things seem hard or tough.
and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and you feel that you've had quite enough...
Just remember that your standing on a planet that's evolving,
and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day.
in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
it's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
but out by us it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point,
we go 'round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light you know;
twelve million miles a minute, that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
Me, I remain deeply concerned that the observed "accelerating expansion" of the universe is an artifact of some advanced intelligence detecting us and deciding to cut us off from the universe, distorting spacetime to do it. Or that just naturally happening. How do we know the universe is expanding? Might we just be "shrinking" as we spiral the plug hole of a black hole? Would the difference even matter? Can we do anything about it from the inside?
If we look at how humans have discovered the earth, it is probably very good that we have not been 'discovered' yet.
Every time a primitive civilization have met a more advanced, the more advanced pretty much eradicated it.
Every time humans have met another species in their way, or useful for something like food or fur, they have been hunted to near extinction.
Maybe this is another anthropocentric observation: We wonder why the ET not been here yet, because as soon as they have, we are dead, and we will not be here to wonder anymore.
"Fix it"
How long have we had radio here on earth? A hundred years? Given the pervasiveness of digital communication and the advancement of communication, how long will radio remain a primary communication medium?
Radio is a very inefficient method of communication. As you point out, a lot of energy is wasted, and bled off into space to radiate around the universe. So, how long will radio be important?
My guess is, not long. So, our total use of radio as a primary communication medium will last a total of 200 years.
There might be intelligently-modulated radio waves flitting around the galaxy. But, they will be very small timeslices compared to the dead quiet. And considering how much electromagnetic noise damned near everything in the universe emits, it'd be a tough job to pinpoint and extract information from a radio transmission even if we were lucky enough to be in the middle of one.
The lack of radio waves hardly constitutes evidence for lack of other intelligent life in the universe. Even if almost every star in the galaxy spawned intelligent life, the chances that the beginning of our ability to detect radio signals would coincide with the passing of a radio signal through earth is very, very small. I imagine we'd have to listen for thousands of years before we'd pick up somebody's "Have Gun, Will Travel" equivalent.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
This isn't meant as a troll, but:
Maybe Christianity is true, and the universe really is just anthropocentric?
Your GP does not understand how small the possibility of something like this happening is, even in a vast universe. The living cell is a structure, and the first one is not built by incremental trial&error as in evolution..you have to have a functional formation who's constituents (DNA or similar) happen to represent the very structure that was arbitrarily formed itself, and are able to replicate themselves into another clone of the original (mitosis or similar).
We are the ultimate result of a very low probability event, and we are alone.
Bah. Of course, that should be 87LY in radius. Oh, well.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Even if ETI's developed around roughly the same time we did (through an act of God or a result of evolution, you pick one), the farther they are away from us, the longer they have to have been around for us to be able to see them.
If an ETI is sitting at more than 200 lightyears from our planet, it'll be damn hard for them to see us right now, since we weren't exactly emiting anything worthwhile into the space around us, over 200 years ago. Same applies to us, for every lightyear in distance, the ETI has to have been around for an extra year and we don't have any proof that advanced cultures like our own last any more than a few thousand years anyway.
Maybe intelligence is just a quick and bright flash on the cosmological timescale that occurs on some types of planets from time to time, rapidly consuming what's there and then extinguishing itself. The fact that we don't see any space-faring ETI's would then simply mean that the universe, sofar, hasn't succeeded in producing any ETI that's been able to leave its star.
One thought problem that came up in Scientific American a few back runs like this.
How long does a civilization take to go from scratch to space travel? On Earth, we went from prehistory to modern day in about 4,000 years, and there's no apparent technical reason why [interstellar] space travel can't happen. Take 5,000 years as a reasonable estimate.
If we send a colony to another star system, one would expect that in another 5,000 years its infrastructure will be sufficiently advanced so that *they* could colonize the next star.
And so on and so on, with civilization spreading throughout the galaxy.
Given the size of the galaxy, how long does it take to for civilization to be everywhere?
The numbers range from as little as 50 million years to as much as 5 billion years, depending on how long a colonization jump takes. The galaxy is about 14 billion years old, so the system should be saturated with civilizations *at least* 3 times over by now.
And the paradox is: where is everyone?
If we do not acknowledge whales and some other primates, in our own backyard, as sentient, intelligent beings, then how can we expect to recognize more exotic forms of intelligent life?
Whenever an estimation has to be done it is also essential to understand that not all societies are technological - there may be human counterparts on other worlds that have a philosophical society - or that there are those who has a completely different timeframe and therefore are living on a much slower pace than we humans do. All the listening for other civilizations are done in a frequency band that has been used only the last 50 years, all due to the need of more bandwidth. If a society doesn't need that bandwidth they are still only using the lower frequencies. A problem here is that it's hard to do radio mapping here due to the fact that many natural phenomenons are causing disturbances.
I toyed with the Drake equation once and got the answer that the number of civilizations in the milky way was 0.86. (I don't remember the figures I put in, but it's still worth to notice.)
So - even if there is life out there, only a fraction of it is intelligent - and even a smaller fraction of it has a technology that releases detectable signs.
Taking into account that my figures got a value less than 1 as a probability value for civilizations in our galaxy means that we may be alone right now in the galaxy right now asking this question. Of course - even if there were 10 civilizations right now in our galaxy that we may be able to actually recognize means that they are likely to be very far apart. Consider that our galaxy may have a diameter of 200000 lightyears, and if we have 10 civilizations in our galaxy evenly spread out there will be about 20000 lightyears between each of them anyway. (star density and uneven distribution not considered).
Another factor that one should bear in mind is that to achieve a certain level of technology some heavy elements has to be readily available. Energy is also a consideration. A planet completely covered with water may be home to an advanced civilization, but that civilization has not one but two boundaries to cross before being out in space. Our air is their space. Another situation will be on a planet where the geology is much less active than on Earth. In that case there is a much smaller altitude variation - which means that water power isn't the primary choice. Forming of coal and oil may also be limited - so no luck there either. OK - there are always exceptions.
On the other hand - if we don't listen - we can't hear if there is somebody else out there.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Out of all the different possibilities of why we haven't made contact, I tend to think it's not that intelligent life doesn't exist, or that they don't care about us, I think it's that they do care, and that's why they're leaving us alone. It's akin to us protecting the animals of this planet, so they can continue to exist and spread. It's quite possible we're under protection also, until we can fend for ourselves.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
... but they're playing video games. Seriously.
It's much easier to build entrancingly-good virtual worlds which push all the right psychological buttons (by creating the illusion of accomplishing what instincts tell you is good for survival) than to go out and conquer foreign worlds. Even if humans made interstellar space travel their top priority, it would be centuries before we could colonize other star systems. By then we'll probably be able to upload our brains into a virtual world much more rewarding than a remote, desolate rock orbiting around some distant star.
Added bonus: as long as Moore's Law holds, time inside a virtual world (measured in clock cycles, not seconds) will be much less limited than our sun's remaining couple billion years of prime fusion.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Has anyone thought that we are watched and recorded by advance alien civilization? Imagine what we would look like on a Discovery Channel special. On some planet, there is HUMAN WEEK.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
You're kind of missing the point of what makes it a paradox. Big is relative, and muted by time. There has been time for the colonization of the entire galaxy several times over, even at tiny fractions of c. So if we aren't the first, then odds are, the galaxy should already be teaming with life (though not necessarily life we would recognize as such).
It behooves us to consider Fermi. The idea is indeed seductive.
On the other hand, just because WE don't usually quite make one hundred years of consciousness, we assume all things told, that six BILLION is old, and Thirteen Billion is even older.
One thing no one has pointed out yet. What if that is YOUNG? Vaunted as he was, Fermi didn't include that as a possibility. He either didn't see it, or discounted it. What if we're the FIRST major civilization to grow? Or, let's use our own development as a yardstick. It took us, what seventy five years? to begin putting the broadcast entertainment onto cable, and stop actually advertising our existence. It won't be much longer, and our planet will be nearly invisible.
Now, if technology develops the same, no matter WHEN, but THAT, it would have taken a hundred years, roughly, for the civ to develop broadcasting, use it, and then, as we are doing, turn it inwards, and not waste power in exo-broadcasting.
So, any star roughly a hundred light years out would be able to pick up our signals, but if their civ had gotten a start a thousand years before ours, well, then, we missed their shows by a millennium. Talk about the need for TIVO.
My point is simple. We assume any civ out there is attempting to get our attention. If they developed like ours, even starting the same day, we won't see them at all, UNLESS they are at the right distance. Otherwise, we won't see their signals, as it already passed us by, or the leading edge hasn't hit us yet.
We won't even go into the many different and varied methods we ourselves use to communicate that never beak the atmosphere, thus making them exo-undetectable. Fermi's assumption is a classic illustration of of assuming... You know, making an @ss out of you and me?
most likely the reason we haven't seen anyh alien intelligences yet is the cosmological speed limit we know as 'c'. even getting close to it isn't fast enough as the relativistic effects make it impractical.
The dinosaurs were around for a few hundred million years and didn't evolve any technology, so even if there is/was life on other planets, it might be like the dinosaurs.
After a period of rule, the dinosaurs die out, other dinosaurs come into being, but the cosmos is not yet ready for sentience...
Maybe sentience happens everywhere simultaneously in the cosmos somewhat like Einstein's spooky-action-a-a-distance.
Maybe the cosmos is just now starting to evolve into the beginning phases of sentience and if that is the case, we and all the other species really are the "first"
I know it sounds kooky but isn't the universe like The Blanket Theory? The whole of everything IS connected. You could say that the universe is ONE organism.
If that is the case, then things could be progressing in stages everywhere in the universe at the same pace, life evolving everywhere at first but without sentience, and as if that was a necessary first step to set the stage for what is to come after, then we and other civilizations may just be starting up right now because the universe is "ready" for it now.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Where is the signal strength analysis? Electromagnetic signals reduce in proportion to the the inverse of the square of the distance, and that is for the signals that are radiated into space-- energy broadcast into space is wasted if you're trying to broadcast to your local planet, so you intentionally try not to broadcast up. Given that, what sort of signal strength can we detect? Heck, the closest star is still more than a light year away- I just did a quick calculation- and man- the signal strength difference between 1m and 1 light year is over 300dB (If I did my calculations right). We have to do very special types of processing to detect GPS signals, and they are only a few thousand miles away.
Of course, that is assuming that "our way" communication by RF modulation is what the alien civilizations would use.
Why go anywhere else?
Why *not* go anywhere else?
First, there's a danger in keeping all your genetic eggs in one basket. Secondly, I don't know about you, but I have a strong yen to stride among the stars. I do know there are many like me. Why climb everest? Why colonize the moon? Or Mars? Why *not* travel to the far reaches of the universe?
Humans are, by and large, creatures with a great curiosity. In the face of a utopia, I'd hope that at least some would wish to explore, and perhaps settle, the great unknown.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
IT'S A COOKBOOK!
The Fermi Paradox is probably dominated by alien physiology. Can all forms of mental illness be cured? If not, it's probably just a matter of time before someone cooks up a lethal bug in a DNA-omatic or crashes a space ship at 0.99 C when learning to Parallel Park.
To survive, technology will need to be idiot proof or you will end up with babies playing with hand grenades that blow up the solar system.
There is a fair bit of evidence to suggest we already have been visited, if not contacted.
1 5-details/'Mile-wide+UFO'+spotted+by+British+airli ne+pilot/article.do0 .html
:)
Some fairly recent ones...
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-234016
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21994224-2,0
There is always a government agency to refute the evidence... though they have little of their own.
No, I do not own a tinfoil hat. I'm just saying, maybe The Truth Is Out There.
They stop broadcasting massive amounts of radio waves quickly. We can't see them because advanced civilizations don't waste energy on high-power low-bandwidth broadcast.
The 1950's through 1980's Earth would be detectable from lightyears away because of the massive amount of long-range broadcasting we did, spewing information in all directions using prodigious quantities of energy.
But we're already switching away from broadcast to narrowcast tech like the 'net. Tell me, when all video goes through wires down the internet, and RF is only used for short-range comms like wifi cell phones and low-power comms like shortwave, what would a radio telescope see, looking at Earth from a few parsecs distance? Not much. An OC-3 carries far more data than a TV broadcast, but can't be detected from more than a few meters away. GSM and WiFi can be detected at a few kilometers, but not outside the atmosphere.
Broadcast is inefficient. Any really advanced civilization knows this, and won't be using it for much. If there were a way of detecting narrowband ultra-high-speed internets at 200LY, I suspect we'd see dozens.
So, assuming other civilizations develop something like ourselves, we have a few decades only to detect them between the development of Radio and the development of Intertubes. Maybe some develop wired technologies first, and all their TV was always on Cable. If so, we don't see 'em unless they're trying to be seen.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Isn't it also a possibility that we have seen planets with intelligent life on it but not the intelligent life itself? Imagine you're on some distant star looking through a telescope at Earth. First you hit the oceans and notice it's everywhere, so you try land. Wow! The Sahara desert is next. Then you pick another random location, and you find yourself in Siberia. And then other random locations you choose to check out may include the Arctic, Antartica, the Himalayas, Nunavut... the list could go on.
So think about it. Maybe the various "floating masses" (to cover everything) we have seen may actually have life. We're just looking in the wrong spots.
One problem with ET estimates which I've never seen addressed is the likelyhood of periodic extinctions.
On Earth, we've seen life evolve to a stable, unintelligent state several times in the past. It seems that life gets to some sort of evolutionary "plateau" and then stays there indefinitely until something comes along to reset everything. This happens about every 60 million years.
This is nothing more than natural selection forcing the evolution of intelligent species. If life on the planet is just animals, then it keeps getting reset until something evolves which is smart enough to notice the problem and do something about it. As a civilization we're starting to notice the effect of asteroid impacts on the planet, and coming up with ways to avoid them.
From this, I suspect that life in the galaxy is actually pretty common, but in the majority of cases it has evolved to some sort of plateau which won't result in intelligence.
How common are mass extinctions in other planets? I don't know of anyone who has studied this. Maybe this should be a separate factor in the Drake equation.
An important idea in the panspermia theory is that when a star goes nova, the biomass is not totally eliminated. Some fragments remain. When new stars and planets coalesce around the remnant masses those become the seeds for a new generation of life.
So according to that theory, we are the alien life forms we're looking for, in a certain sense.
If mankind is to persist another thousand years we'll have to solve a number of important puzzles. To survive a hundred thousand we'll have to solve many more. By then the pointlessness of immortality as a species may be self evident.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think. Why take the trouble to scrap it up with a pestilent life form at the bottom of a steep gravity well when mass and energy are abundant in the oort cloud and asteroid belt free for the taking? Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?
I think what's left is tourism. Intelligence and curiosity are sufficiently linked that a life form evolved enough to solve the necessary problems would want to watch us develop if they could. Perhaps they're here now, secretly recording our ridiculous antics for their own version of reality tv.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Given an advanced civilisation picks up our radiosignals many lightyears from here (and somehow boost them enough to decode anything legible from them), some of the first representants of our civilisation they'll see will be Laurel & Hardy.
Given that the radio first was widely adopted in 1920 that gives us 80 years (given that noone has picked it up yet) from the aliens becoming aware of our presence to them seeing George Bush and deciding to euthanize us.
...and that's the condition that we'll go on to colonize new habitats. Let's assume there are no shortcuts, no warp drive. Getting to the next star in the really cheap way, slingshotting around Jupiter takes about 70-75,000 years (no matter what propulsion technology you use) and if you want to use anti-matter drive it's going to burn ungodly amounts of fuel. What does that mean? Well, it means it won't be like the Roman empire, the British empire or anything like that. Even if you spend a vast fortune on building a remote colony, there won't be any riches flowing back ever because even the rarest of precious metals doesn't even cover the transport.
You can already tell with the moon, we went there and it's a big rock. Maybe if we get those fusion reactors working we'll need the He3, but apart from that interest is pretty low. If we're going back there people want to know "so what are we getting out of this?" Mars still has the exploring prospect that we haven't been there, but the probes have given us a very good idea what's there, it's not like the astronauts will be making grand new discoveries. Pretty soon people will be asking what's the point of going, what's the ROI, what's the long-term goal. Now imagine trying to sell an interstellar travel that'll net you a big old nothing but absurd expenses and results that are thounsands of years away.
All I'm saying is that the rate we will expand into the galaxy is going to be a helluva lot slower than we could expand into the galaxy. Without the economic incentives of land, power and riches I think it'll be a very slow march to space. Abd I have a pretty good faith that'll apply to other civilizations as well.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think the answer is that civilizations don't last long enough to communicate with other civilizations.
The underlying assumption here is that intelligent civilizations, past a certain point, are immune from extinction. That's a pretty egotistical assumption to make, especially since you can measure our history in the thousands of years, and our ability to communicate wirelessly in decades.
To the universe, we're not even a flash in the pan.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
It doesn't take a few generations. After Rome abandoned Britain in 410, advanced pottery and metalworking vanished from the archaeological record in about one generation - making that high quality vase no longer paid as well as farming or fighting, and once that one generation that knew how to produce the vase died, no one could do it again for a very long time. Afraid I can't remember the title of the book I read that in.
The universe has been around for over 10 billion years. Civilization - a few thousand. If you look at the human view of reality from 3000 years ago vs. now, the difference is vast. It seems reasonable to believe that, if we continue progress at our current rate, civilization 3000 years from now may be unrecognizable. The conception we have of the fundamental "stuff" of the universe and the dimensions that make it up are so different from before, and they will likely be different in the future. We are also moving towards total control of our genetic makeup and the implementation of those genes. It doesn't take much imagination to envision a future where there are no longer singular humans, but instead a merging of various specialized bio-systems and electronic systems to form a network entities unlike those ever known, operating in unforeseen dimensions discovered by future sciences. And then we come to science. Science is just one view, a tool, for operating in reality. It is not reality itself, but a way of generating models of reality. What lies underneath existed before science itself, and there are certainly other ways of engaging reality besides science, and perhaps even better systems that are more effective and closer to the truth, as yet undiscovered. To believe that in this last several hundred years we've discovered the final system that describes reality is hubris in the extreme.
Another idea, though a bit more in the realm of science-fiction, is that perhaps we are not as special as we think. Ants are likely not aware of birds and humans, and swallows are likely not aware of whales. What makes us think we can detect every branch of the tree of life? Perhaps there are beings far more advanced than ourselves, the same as we are in relation to ants, and they branch off of our tree, but just operate in dimensions that our organs are incapable of detecting. Oh, these human creatures and their "brains".
Anyway, my point is simply that the realm of possibility is so great, and I fear that we are anthropomorphizing the rest of the universe and limiting it in silly ways. Was there some greek boy 2000 years ago wondering why he hadn't got a chance to meet one of the gods yet? We see this as a silly question now, perhaps our current questions will be silly with a new perspective.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Leeloo Dallas Multipass, is that you?
Your pacifism is a brilliant survival strategy. The most successful animals on earth are the ones we farm as livestock.
Patience my ass! I only have about 40-50 years left, if I'm lucky. GET MOVING!
As far as consciousness retreating into virtual worlds, I find this rather probable. However, if civilizations in our galaxy have done this, we would notice it. Surely, some of the simulations would require increasing resources to maintain, because simulations get better the larger and more detailed they are. Give it a few years of increasing energy demands (say a million) and you should see solar-system-scale engineering projects, and then projects that go beyond their original solar system.
I'm trying not to make too many assumptions about life in general, but one safe one is that when habitat is available, life moves into it. And advanced civilizations do not exactly needs rare habitats. A star and a bunch of common elements is enough to build and power habitats, simulation computers or whatever. We know this because we do it, and advanced civilizations won't be worse than us at this. So the question can be put this way: Why would advanced life refuse to expand into hospitable and empty habitats when they are available? This has no precedent in our experience with life, and requires some extraordinary explanation which I cannot even begin to guess at.
Yer right.
Space is flat flat flat.
Like yer heds.
Yer caint noway jes burro thru a shorcut. Nowway !
Ai ain got time to listen to that nonsense !
Shorenuff.
An U don rilly feel like talkin to anyone, anyways !
Notice how there are no fundie posts on this topic...they're all at church :)
There's an invisible barrier around our solar system that blocks their transmissions... and if they try to visit us, their ship gets turned into comets.
(Short story named "Crystal Spheres". Definitely an interesting read, too.)
Galactus devoured them.
"At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating probes by now. By we've seen absolutely nothing."
Oh, someone mapped the asteroid field between mars and Jupiter when I was sleeping last night? To be frank, there could be a hundred probes the size of an SUV floating among those asteroids and even if they looked interesting enough to warrant investigation instead of being cleverly disguised as a rock using the technology of a million year old civilization... odds are we wouldn't have noticed yet. And that's not even taking into account the billions of rocks floating around in the Kuiper belt, *none* of which we have pictures of.
Combine our woeful lack of a comprehensive survey of our own inner solar system with the fact that any advanced civ would probably be using directed line-of-sight communications, and I personally believe the best answer to the Fermi Paradox at this point is that we just haven't looked (for probes) and we aren't in a place where we could ever hear (communication). That and we've been "interesting" for *maybe* two or three thousand years, and it might well take that long for someone to show up in person once they decided we were worth visiting.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
I know curiosity isn't technology, but...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
What an extremely narrow and self-centered view of the universe.
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have. For a 1 in 1 billion chance, that's still 500 star systems. And there are up to 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Even if only 1 out of every billion star systems will support life - or perhaps 1 out of every 5 billion planets - that would still mean there could be trillions of life-supporting star systems in the universe. Given that there are not one, but two planets in our system that are capable of supporting life (Earth and Mars), both of which may have actually supported life, it's certainly no stretch to think there are at least this many planets out there that could support life and that at least some of them are actually doing so.
It's all too easy to draw conclusions for the entire universe based on observations of your local area. People do it not just when thinking of extra terrestrials but even when thinking of other people and cultures on our own planet. There's a tendency to think that the way we do things is just the way that things should be done. But there are many ways life can develop, many ways life can be supported, and many, many planets that are much too far away for us to observe or for them to observe us. It's foolish to think that we are alone simply because we have not observed any other intelligent life in the few hundred years we've been looking.
Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
I notices the same problem with fabulous babes. Allegedly many exist, so they should be all over me. But they're not. Eerie.
Loose lips lose spit.
I remember reading a column by the physicist Paul Davies in which he showed that the multiverse model of the universe leads inevitably to the conclusion that we're just a computer simulation within a simulation within a simulation:
"For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds -- some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum."
- A Brief History of the Multiverse
That said, maybe we just need the cheap bastard who's running our little MMPORM(ultiverse) to ante up for the expansion pack.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
That's an interesting idea. So to go a little further with it, maybe the radio spectrum is too precious to devote one frequency to broadcasts that cover hundreds of square miles (or kilometers, or space-man area units, whatever). So in the future, maybe we won't divide the spectrum up into these big monolithic channels with big monolithic 500,000W transmitters like we are doing with TV right now; instead, we'll have a bunch of short-range transmitters linked by fiber or something. Once it gets into space, literally billions of low-power broadcasts across a huge range of frequencies would just blend together as just a whole bunch of white noise.
On the other hand, there would probably continue to be regulatory agencies controlling the spectrum, so the white noise would have notches in it as an artifact of that. So it would at least look man-made.
It would take a certain degree of rationality to actualy achieve a level of technology that would enable a universe spanning empire.
It seems to me that once you become rational enough to achieve the goal, you would realize there isn't any point to it.....
My guess is that life is very common throughout the universe, probably showing up wherever conditions allow it in any form. Most of it will be single-celled organisms, as most of the time that life has existed on earth, single-celled was the norm. Rarer will be planets with a wide variety of life forms as we have here on Earth. Intelligence, however is going to be extremely rare. Consider that of all the species of the billions that have ever existed here, humans are the only ones who have developed the ability to build a technological society.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
See, I think the answer for everything is "the Cuban paradox". I live in Miami, and I see NO INTELLIGENT LIFE AROUND WHATSOEVER!!!!
They all came from Cuba, got a greencard, a pack of cigarettes and a box of dominoes, got 5 kids so they can live from the government checks, and got sub-prime equity loans so they can buy plasma TVs and 22 inch rims for their cars.
So, either the older civilizations got extincted by the proliferation of their own type of Cubans, or they don't want to meet us because when they screen our planet and see the Cubans around with their stupid loud radios and pathetic dumb behavior, they just think:"well, better not to meet those guys... their social disease might be contagious..."
Exactly. I would guess that ET would look somewhat like us, but I seriously doubt he would act like us. Once an intelligent species can achieve religion, philosophy, and the joys of love between a male and a female, what are the chances that they are going to become as obsessed with physical science as a handful of Europeans did on our planet, to develop the kind of technology we're looking for? Of course, it's impossible to do anything other than baselessly speculate. But I speculate that we're extremely unique in our pursuit of hi-tech.
Keep in mind, that even on our own planet, humanity (in the form of Ergaster) first invented what technology it needed, (bifurcated hand axes, picks, etc.) and then made not a single further technological improvement in one million years. The course humanity took which lead it in a highly technical direction, for example, which lead it to develop the technology of writing, does not seem like a necessarily common course to me. It certainly wasn't common on our planet. It's just that once these technologies, such as writing, emerged, they tended to spread from culture to culture. None of the known extant cultures today which have progressed in isolation from this spread of technology have independently developed writing, or other technology beyond their basic needs. Nor do they seem feel any urge to do so. To me this confirms that this development is in fact an aberation.
"The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small."
I do not believe distance is a problem.
Increasingly we are finding physical solutions in the laboratory that suggest distance isn't a problem, particularly with quantum teleportation.
Modern physics is great if you want to construct a nuclear aircraft carrier, or a atomic bomb. The laws we have created from observation will build these things just fine. Also note, all major advances in humans beings knowledge has so far been ONLY from the fact we are hateful, selfish creatures in these areas and love to blow our fellow creatures away in every means possible. EVERY major advance in physics in the 20th century was from building the A Bomb/Hydrogen bomb.
Same in aerodynamics, build better airplaces that can fly further to "Drop those bombs".
But I digress....
But, say if you want to create a interstellar drive or propulsion system, our physics is EXTREMELY primitive. But that is because we don't WANT TO.
We are too busy seeing how big of a house we can get and pack it full of worthless crap. Exploring space is the last thing we have on our minds, so the physics to do it is not yet available in a practical sense. (i.e. we use the same physics to power space exploration as we do with airplanes...etc.).
I would like to remind everyone here that we still do not know how gravity works in the standard model.
I mean, take for example how we CALCULATE gravimetric equations, such as using Runge Kutta 5 methodologies.
The greatest break through in calculus was finding the instantaneous solution to a average problem.
For example take speed. You can get MPH which is d/t=speed, but in a 1 hour trip how do you find the speed at time 45 minutes, 23 seconds?
??
The derivative answers those sorts of questions.
The problem of course, physics has a hard time reconciling an "instantaneous moment" with everything that has a speed limit of light.
Which of course, is how we plot the course of ALL planetary probes. It is a VERY odd thing to suggest gravity travels at only the speed of light when the mathematical methodology your using requires you to use instantaneous moments to make course corrections in a 10 body problem.
Last time I looked, there was no propogation corrections for gravity in any astro mechanics textbook I have ever read. For astro physics this is a common thing to do, but then, you are measuring the light of objects reaching you, not gravity. In fact when communicating with the mars rovers, we have to compensate for the speed of light any action we take with the rover.
Just because a Probe is say 93 Million miles from the sun, we do not compensate thrusters because the course in direction in a gravity field as to "propagate" back to the sun in 4 minutes or so. It is instantaneous.
Which is my point.
Of course it "just works" so here we sit, still not understanding why? My guess is, that the standard model is probably about 20% there. There are other forces, and energies in the universe that comprise our physical space. If I told you there was a form of energy that permeates the entire universe, you would probably have called me nuts a few years ago.
But now, we know there is yet another force we do not understand how it works, besides gravity. (i.e. Google "Dark Energy").
No, that isn't correct, THREE forces. (Google Dark Matter).
Can you make a propulsion system out of these forces? (i.e. Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy). Who knows!
Now for the shocker: "We are absolutely bathed in the stuff all the time Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Actual matter, you know the
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
To me, the Fermi Paradox doesn't necessarily speak to the non-existence of intelligent life. Maybe it says something about the ability of intelligent life to colonize the galaxy. Perhaps it's an energy issue -- were is all the power to travel and colonize the galaxy going to come from and is it worth harvesting it for space travel? Perhaps it's a time issue --even with light speed travel is it worth it to send their people that far? Perhaps it's a socio-political issue -- can a civilization be stable enough long enough to get such huge projects underway and complete them? Perhaps it's an environmental issue -- even the hospitable earth has mass extinctions every 62 million years; perhaps there's no place that's hospitable enough long enough for civilizations to get much further than we have.
We're an "intelligent" species by some loose definition. We also know that our one intelligent species hasn't achieved meaningful space travel or communication. And I'm not convinced by looking at our collective milieu that we'll be colonizing the galaxy in the next billion years either.
It's all conjecture; I personally think there's life out there, even intelligent life. But we'll probably never meet -- it's just too much effort. And I don't think the Fermi Paradox (which is based on the assumption that galactic colonization is viable) says much about it.
Cheers.
Is that the Disclosure Project has already provided a solution to the Fermi Paradox. If we assume that the testimony of hundreds of highly qualified and sober minded military and civilian pilots, other military officials, and astronauts is in fact true then we can only conclude that we're embedded in a galactic civilization filled with possibly half a dozen or more different ET civilizations.
But if that's true then why haven't they made contact yet?
Well, I would say it can best be explained by saying that there may be a governing law among the civilizations that forbids overt contact (e.g., Meeting with the UN) by any ET civilization with Earth. However, visits can be made for the purpose of scientific study and other reasons that don't interfere significantly with the development of Earth civilization. Sort of like a weak Prime Directive.
But, that won't stop the occasional violations of that law which might explain abductions, crop circles, and other events that have occurred, including periodic craft crashes because of mechanical failure. Because if you have craft from numerous civilizations flying around a planet you're bound to have crashes from time to time and when they happen of course the beings on the planet you're observing will get their hands on the technology, but they wouldn't understand most of it as it would be thousands of years beyond their understanding. But what they do understand and study will be incorporated into their own scientific and technological development. I suspect this is what happened with Roswell, both with the crash and the subsequent use of the crash debris.
So the only reason why we haven't had overt contact from them is that they haven't decided to do so yet. But, I strongly suspect that as humanity moves more into space and his technological progress continues that there shall be an overwhelming need by them to finally establish open contact and acquaint humanity with the reality of the numerous ET Civilizations that they share the galaxy with and how they must comport themselves if they wish to live among them.
And I doubt it's going to take much longer for this to finally happen. I'd give it another 10 years or so.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I for one believe that we have been visited by ETI. It's just that they are so far advanced compared to us meager earthlings that they have no inclination to strike up a conversation with us. Also, I think the reason we have not heard one peep out of the Galactic Community via our radio telescopes is not that we're listening on the wrong channel, it's that we're using the wrong radio. When we build our first microwave gravity-wave radio, we'll be hard pressed to separate one conversation from another.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
There are so many choices. I wonder which god it was.
Aside from the possibility that they all became so intelligent that they failed to find mating partners and died off (this is based on observation of IT folk), there are other possibilities:
- they visited and didn't leave a trace
- one or two of the abduction theories are true
- they look like us
- Men In Black is non-fiction
- they followed the Star Trek approach of not interfering with other civilisations
- too busy watching satellite TV
- stuck in virtual reality
- etc.
BTW I assume we are talking about extra terrestrials, as opposed the US definition of alien, which is anyone who is not American?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Has it crossed anyone's mind that we could be alone? Bacteria and other forms of life aside, is there any reason to believe that galaxies team with life, just because there are so many?
Something like 90% of the solar systems out there contain *nothing* but gasses, a bunch more have planets too far or too close to their sun. Still more are in flux- near black holes, and pulsars and the like.
I'd love to see something out there, too, but I'm a little dubious about the likelihood. There are perhaps a million combinations of circumstances that allow us to be, and be here. Everything from a precise gravity to an orbiting moon; it's not a simple circumstance.
For example, let's have a party:
-desire to have it
-guests
-drinks
-location
-music
-chips/etc
Without all of these, a party isn't going to happen. These six things, each having a yes/no answer, form an equation, like a probability, of 32 possibilities. The chances [generally speaking] are 1:32.
But the requirements to have life anything like us is hundreds of times larger. Sure, we might meet a silicon-based race, but that sure seems like an outside chance. (But at least they wouldn't be inspired to eat us...)
Don't feel bad if we find nothing; there's just such a small chance, and even if we did, your whole family line would be dead before we could *start* to go there.
Enjoy life now; look for Him.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
This is one of the most likely reasons we've not "seen" anything as yet. As far as we know, interstellar travel is annoyingly slow and energy intensive; that alone could account for no visitors, no matter how well populated the universe is with intelligent beings. That leaves communications; but our experience here indicates that catching the communications of others is very unlikely. Why? Well, we've been hanging about for 50,000 years or so in the form we like to consider actually "us." Of that 50,000 years, we've been using radio and television for about 100 years now. But in the last 25 years, more and more of our radio and television signals have been finding their way into satellite to ground signals, which do not radiate away from the planet and are very, very low power; other signals are now traveling inside cables instead of the through the air; and finally, newer communications are moving to optical methods, and we're talking optical in cables for the most part, meaning again, less and less high powered "accidental" signal radiation (effectively zero in terms of interstellar distances.) The reasons are higher bandwidth, vastly more communications channels, more energy efficient, better control over where the signal goes - and doesn't go. These are reasons that transcend our civilization; there is every reason to think that other beings would find the same benefits.
Next, look at our development: We're paranoid. We have been prey for a lot of living things ranging from other people to lions to snakes to spiders to bacteria, consequently we're not of the mind that the universe is likely to be a friendly playground. You can find reactions to that notion everywhere from science fiction to the unwillingness of today's moms to let their kids play outdoors unsupervised. Looking at our SETI program, the first thing you probably notice is that we're listening (poorly), which seems prudent; but we are not intentionally transmitting a signal to the stars, which has been a political decision. That leaves the accidental radiation, the strongest of which has been radar transmissions, which are mostly information free... but even if they're enough to get us noticed, we've only been at this for a 100 years, so our signals are only 100 light-years out so far. That severely reduces the number of potential listeners, and of course it presumes they, like us, are listening for anything, not just signals modulated with complex information.
Also, as an earlier poster observed with a quote from Douglas Adams, the universe is gi-flipping-normous.
All of this contributes to why Fermi's Paradox should be considered Fermi's Blunder by anyone who really thinks this through.
I see no reason to doubt there are plenty of other life-bearing planets out there, and that a fairly significant number of those in turn have intelligent life of one form or another. The fact that we've not "heard" any of them doesn't surprise me one little bit, Fermi's naive reasoning aside. In another 100 years, the odds of us radiating anything at all from our little corner of the universe are probably very low indeed. If that's typical (and it may be longer than typical), then in order to "catch" someone else transmitting by accident, we'll have to be listening at the same time + distance in light years that they go through the RF development process, and we'll have to have sensitive enough equipment to hear them. That last point is interesting, because although technically speaking, we are listening for "them", we're presuming they're sending at the low-noise point of the spectrum with the intent of us hearing them. If it was accidental radiation like radio and TV we were looking for, we couldn't hear that with our current gear at all. In order to get to that level of sensitivity, we'll need outer space "ears", and pretty big ones. Nothing like that is even on the drawing boards. So again, the odds of us hearing anyo
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Secondly... All civilizations will either reach a technological singularity or not leave their planet which means they might get something faster than the speed of light and a quicker way to reproduce themselves which leaves only 3 types of civilizations we might encounter:
A. Civilizations that don't want to colonize and don't want to interfere with the rest of the universe but may explore.
B. Civilizations that want to save all sentient life in the universe by assimilating them or granting their knowledge in positive means.
Or...
C. Civilizations that see everything else as a threat and must be conquered or destroyed.
That said... You'll not see a good deal of type A because they want don't really want to interfere with the locals.
Which means we'll either see type B or C next which given their goals will only take less than a million years for them to show up and either blow our planet up or assimilate us into their collective nirvana or make us read their holy book
Even if an alien civilization was the hands off A type, they will eventually run into a C which either they'll have to duke it out one way or another because a true type C would basically sent its forces to every rock in the universe search for intelligence to conquer or destroy.
And we're talking about nano-bot drones that could cover every inch of land consuming all life or simply setting off a super blast of cosmic rays to vaporize all life in the solar system and then tossing the the matter into large collection points in order to stave off heat death.
So the question we should be asking is if there is other life in the universe, then why haven't they colonized all of it?
Either they don't care, don't want to interfere, or just haven't gotten around to us yet.
Either way we would notice if a civilizations started building dyson sphere or blowing other other systems in their goal of complete assimilation of the universe.
Personally, I think we are just early and therefore we get the chance to be the borgs of universe.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If there were civilizations out there with spaceships that could travel instantly across time/space are we sure we would want them to know about us, or might the risk be a bit more than we are comfortable with. I would love to "talk" with an extrastellar civilization, but I'm not sure about a face-to-face meeting and I'm sure more than a couple of our neighbors think the same way
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
In this galaxy, or the universe? There's a pretty massive difference in scale there.
In any case, I disagree. I'm not convinced that any intelligent life will necessarily develop the ability to spread throughout a galaxy or even fill it with probes. There could be many other explanations for lack of contact - civilizations may tend to be short-lived, or the energy requirements for such feats may be unreasonable.
Pacifism also works if you define it to allow the use of coercion (changing your foe) but not violence (killing your foe).
For example, you could re-engineer your opponent's DNA to reduce aggression. Or you could brain wash them. Etc.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That is not true. It's not that the conditions and chemical constitution of the environment need to be the same, it's the fact that their needs to be a very low probability event (or set of events) occur for the first "living" cell to result from some arbitrary water-based reaction somewhere in the planet, giving us a cell that has at least basic reproduction and respiratory (energy converting) capabilities. Evolution cannot aid this first cell: there are none before it. It has to come as a result of a single "miracle moment" where the necessary compounds for a connected cell wall, nucleus, DNA..etc all form at the same time AND at the same small point in space, albeit at a much smaller degree of complexity compared to living cells today.
Wow. No serious scientist has proposed life starting by a cell miraculously springing into existence with no prior evolution involved.
Most of the pre-biotic soup theories involve dilute mixtures of animo aids, peptides, sugars, polymers, etc, that replicate as a group. No DNA or similar is involved, there are no cell walls, little or no respiratory capabilities. These features all evolve incrementally and independantly over time. As Darwin noted, the "first life" might have been a salty, slightly greasy, tidal pool.
Assuming a civilization was advanced enough to be able to travel and communicate galactic distances, they would also have long ago realized what we only recently learned, which is that the Andromeda galaxy is due to collide with our own in about two billion years. Probably not much they could do about that, so they charted out another more hospitable galaxy and took off. So long and thanks for all the fish.
I completely agree that it's ridiculous for us to expect other civilizations to be sending out radio waves based on our 100- year use of them. Radio waves have a lot of limitations, and we have no idea if we'll be using them much longer. If gravity wave communication becomes possible, for example, then that's probably what the rest of the galaxy would be using if they developed high technology.
However, no other civilization will be exactly the same as us. It seems that we have to treat a very fine line to remain high-tech. Other civilizations will probably either never have gone down the high-tech path, and only communicate in song, story, and dance; or else will have become intelligent enough to consciously choose simplicity of life, and only communicate in song, story, and dance.
The proof that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life is, that they have not contacted us.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The Aliens are probably out there, they're just smart enough to avoid and hide from us. If you were an alien and monitored our TV and radio transmissions, would you want to contact or be contacted by us? Seriously. People still kill others for believing in a different God (or Prophet) for f*cks sake.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If by "intelligent life" you mean human-like civilization with very complic... er, "rich material culture" way of life, I completely agree.
However, it is very much possible that Cosmos is full of various intelligent beings of different kinds, covering spectrum from dolphin-like intelligent, playful, social and friendly creatures, all the way to almost "Alien"-like super tough, hive-building predator killer monsters. However, what we probably won't find in high supply is any kind of beings capable or wanting to travel out of their home worlds.
Because, you see, the story of humans on Earth is story of a nerd beating all the jocks and becoming the top dog in his school, all that without giving up his nerdness and growing muscles, of course (e.g. by going to the gym and working out). While such story has certain appeal and makes a nice comedy plot, it is very unlikely to happen out of the realm of fiction, and even less likely to happen twice (or at least not very often).
We as a species broke out of the beaten path of survival because of peculiar pattern of our ancestors' position in food chain and our planet's climate history.
It is not some inevitable fate that will happen anywhere if you give it enough time, like Karl Sagan believed. It is more of a deviation from usual cycles of evolution. Besides, we still may fall back to self-indulgence (and we actually regularly do, according to history of most successful and organized societies from the past). Once we make it the way we want it and solve all our problems that worry us on this planet, we won't even wish to go out and search for some alien intelligent life, just like those hypothetic intelligent top-of-the-food-chain superbeasts I mentioned before. Absolute success is as much a showkiller as catastrophic failure.
I think you are exactly right. We are already giving out a much smaller RF fingerprint than we did in, say, 1980, simply because we're finding better ways to communicate. We have also been moving our RF usage to higher frequencies, which tend to be shorter range (as any ham knows). I expect the usual pattern of civilizations is to be "noisy" for a short time, then go silent. Personally, I have no trouble believing there are other life forms out there. But I doubt we are going to find them unless they want to be found.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
For example, you could re-engineer your opponent's DNA to reduce aggression. Or you could brain wash them. Etc.
Why not just blow up their planet with a Death Star and call it day?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Fermi Paradox isn't even applicable! All those alien UFOs out there that people keep ignoring! At least thats what my grandfather told me.
Why not just blow up their planet with a Death Star and call it day? That would seem likely to violate the 'no killing' proposition that pacifism is based on?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
But you (or any member of your species) don't have 2 billion years to explore, you only have 50 years or so (maybe more, but probably not more than one or two orders or magnitude, so 5000 years at the upper limit). In that time you can, if your technology is really good and you have (literally) tons of energy to burn, get to the nearest starts. Most of those stars will be uninteresting red dwarfs, with little likelihood of supporting life on their planets. Even if you used unmanned "self-replicating" probes, nobody that built or launched the probes would be alive when they reach their destinations: it's awfully hard to keep a project running across tens of lifetimes.
idesofmarch goes on:
My guess, based on historical performance, is that we will be thoroughly extinct by then. Two billion years, after all, is a very long time.
The best answer to the Fermi Paradox, in my opinion, is either that interstellar travel just isn't worth it (too slow and expensive for no particular gain), or there is some pheonomena, of which we are currently unaware, that prevents it (my bet is that the interstellar medium, outside of a strong magnetic field like that produced by a star, rapidly destroys solid objects).
just a ghost in the machine.
They've visited us numerous times, and throughout our Earth's history (humans are relatively very young, and have only been around for a very small portion of time). But, for any semblance of proof, start at this non-profit organization. Then, read the hundreds of very well referenced books, talk to the thousands of witnesses, watch the videos, see the images. You can even cut out 99% of the stuff you find on the subject. Cut out the questionable sources that would make any illogical skeptic proud, and you would still have overwhelming evidences. You can even go into the in depth investigation of these by scientist doing nothing more than trying to get us closer to a truth.
There is in fact a cover-up, it's largely to blame for the missing "proof", and this has been known for decades to many of us. But, there will always be those that choose to believe that these ignorant beings are going to just fly around like bees without any regard for the humans that might be able to see them and ask "why haven't they landed in my front yard? I won't believe until then...", etc... There is far more evidence than what would be needed to prove their existence in a court of law, handily, easily, without question, over and over again. That should be good enough for most, but alas it is not.
Fermi's paradox is simply partly due to the cover-up, partly due to these beings being intelligent (don't want them to see us? no problem...), and partly due to people just not wanting to realizing the information that is out there for perusal. Nothing more...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Evolution favours societies that cooperate over individuals, for the most part. This is because individuals have different weaknesses that can be overcome by combining a number of them into a group. Similarly, it tends to favour species that enter into symbiotic relationships with other species. Consider how well the horse did as a result of its relationship with humanity. If there are a number of ETIs then the ones that cooperate with each other will have an advantage over the ones that don't; they will be able to combine their strengths.
Of course, cooperation is a somewhat loose term here. We cooperate with sheep, for example, giving them food in exchange for wool and food. The exact rôle humanity would play in this kind of cooperation with a ETI is uncertain.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If we can do it on a large enough scale then the aliens will starve. That means we win. Unless they develop cake, then we have to develop a cake eating fungus... we should probably get working on that now so we're one step ahead.
OK, but how does DNA or any other "feature" evolve from the "soup" over time? What is this incremental process based on? How do these non-living compounds replicate? Serious question, IANAB and have never read anything about sugars replicating before.
So, build a matrix of peer-to-peer sensors set to look for signs of intelligent life, and have them report their findings back to you. Might take a while, but certainly quicker than searching randomly. Once you've found the neighbors... go make friends. Bring beer.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
I don't think it's particularly unreasonable. Immune is possibly too strong a term, but once a species has started colonising other star systems then it takes a lot to wipe them out.
Yes, but what are the odds of that? As our technology advances, is gets easier and easier for small groups or even individuals to do what it once took the resources of nations to do. Honestly, which is likely to happen first, we find or successfully terraform and colonize an extra-solar planet, or some irate group or individual creates a superbug/nanogoo/WMD in their basement and unleashes it on the world?
One of these scenarios requires the advancement of civilization well beyond our current capabilities, and might not even ever be practical. The other is just around the corner. Heck, it could be happening in a basement in your neighborhood right now.
Even then, it seems likely that civilizations do not get harder to wipe out the more advanced they get. Rather, they become more and more capable of wiping themselves out. As they become more and more advanced, it requires fewer and fewer individuals with less and less resources to do the job. I'm skeptical interstellar colonization is ever practical, but for any civilization that manages to achieve that level of advancement, it seems like it's be even more vulnerable to self-destruction than we are. Imagine the resources and technologies such a people must posses. What can these guys brew in their basements?
I know, it's pretty much required that they have gained impressive mastery of their own internal issues to even manage to reach that state. Perhaps some sort of police-state, or mind implants, or super-ethical society, or something has occurred to prevent them from wiping themselves out. But at that level of technology, it only takes one individual to slip through the cracks, and pow, bye-bye planet.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The age argument doesn't really hold up.
It's like trying to find a particular bacterium on the earth somewhere. Yeah, maybe we'll have the technology one day to find each and every microbe on the planet and investigate it through some method of detection. But:
1) Would we bother?
2) Would the bacterium know what we were doing?
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Our radio systems are moving towards ultra-wideband which
looks like noise to an ordinary receiver and is very difficult
to intercept if you don't have the encryption key or time
sequence key. Using quantum entanglement for communication
might eliminate radio.
If you think of the brain as a quantum entangled computer,
meditation might be the quickest way to get in contact with aliens.
O please, the whole "if are there, why haven't we seen/hear from them?" is completely ridiculous. Its based on the possibly flawed assumption that other intelligent life has evolved before us, and developed to a point where they can transmit the signals we are looking for, AND has done this several thousand years ago. If they evolved around the same time as us, then it stands to reason that no signals would be comming from other worlds simply due to the time it takes for light to travel. Our own signals have only been traveling for about 60 light years (or so) since we started broadcasting with enough strength, that means they have only reached as far as the nearest star to our sun. If our signals haven't been able to travel far enough for others to see us, why should be assume that we can see others?
Give it about 300,000 years, then you can talk.
I can't see the paradox at all. We have problem conceptualizing infinity, which is what I think is the reason for the belief that there is a paradox.
Given a tiny chance of life in any given solar system, no matter how small, as the number of solar systems approaches infinity, the chance of there being life on at least one of them approaches certainty, and even more boggling, the number of solar systems with life on them also approaches infinity.
However, even though there should be hordes of aliens out there, as the number of solar systems approach infinity, the predicted distance between any two solar systems also approaches infinity.
And, and here's where maths comes in handy. All infinities are not equal, and infinity:infinity doesn't have to equal 1. If people have two arms, and number of people increase towards infinity, it the number of arms also increase towards infinity. But, that doesn't mean that each person suddenly will have one arm, because infinity:infinity = 1:1. No, it doesn't work that way. Similarly here. As the chances of life in the universe grows, even to the point of there being infinitely many forms of life out there, the distance also grows, and even if the chance of two civilizations meeting also increases towards certainty, the chance that one particular civilization will be in contact with another doesn't necessarily approach certainty.
And big as space is, it isn't infinite. There won't be an infinity of civilizations in it. But it's big enough that no matter how many civilizations there are, they may very well be separated by enough space (and thus time) that contact would be impossible.
As for sending signals that can be caught by other civilizations, it's not because of xenophobia that we don't, but because it's pointless. If we send out a signal now, what good does it do us if aliens one billion years from now receive it? By the time they would be able to respond, two billion years would have passed.
Regards,
--
*Art
Another variable to the Fermi Paradox that needs some serious looking at is the mortality rate of civilizations.
Suppose we assume a good deal of Darwinian interaction between species. Eventually, we will get a few top species. It stands to reason that they will keep down the small upstart species, much like our bodies keep bacteria at bay. Therefore, a species evolving radio communications is a death sentence, unless the home star is very remote, and the civilization can grow fast and aggressive enough to survive a galactic war.
How do local supernovas scouring away all live in their regions fit in? Perhaps we're overdue and don't know it?
For a 1 in 1 billion chance, that's still 500 star systems. [...] Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
Yeah, yeah, you seem to think that no one has ever made the statistical argument before. But facts still remain that a HUGE amount of time has passed. Read about the Fermi Paradox before spouting all these arguments that have been made before... they don't explain the lack of evidence.
When I say intelligent life is "extremely improbable", I mean it might be 1e20 to 1 chance. Or 1e100 to 1 chance. or 1e100000 to 1 chance. How do we know? Maybe it took 1e100000 universes for it to happen.
Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
Because they would have filled the galaxy by now. The galaxy is OLD, and a self replicating probe would fill the galaxy in relatively short order, even at sublight speeds.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Read up on prions.
Essentially it's a protein that affects the structure of other similar proteins by virtue of it's structure.
A self replicating protein. An inanimate object that replicates itself? Maybe.
I'm not convinced that any intelligent life will necessarily develop the ability to spread throughout a galaxy or even fill it with probes.
It only takes one. There are NO civilizations that are curious enough to make a self replicating probe? There are NO civilizations that might create a sleep ship to seed other planets?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Similarly, it tends to favour species that enter into symbiotic relationships with other species. Consider how well the horse did as a result of its relationship with humanity.
The horse was hunted to extinction on some continents. On others it was made a slave, and still the occasional food source. That is the sort of relationship I think we are all fearing. It is not that different from your sheep example.
A symbiotic relationship requires the ability of one species to help the other. If ET shows up we will be too technologically backwards to provide what we would probably consider an equitable relationship.
Also aggressive does not necessarily mean uncooperative. Aggressiveness just makes a species more selective about who they cooperate with.
Maybe life on other planets is still governed by the laws of natural selection and resulted in the evolution (as it has on Earth) of petty-minded geniuses that teeters on the brink of nuclear destruction. They could've finished each other off aeons ago, perhaps we were just late to the party?
First, back when I took Space Rocks for Jocks Barnard's Star was the closest thing to an exosolar planet and Sagan's speculation that planetary systems were the norm was a few years into the future. The article mentions a lot of reasons why we should now think life is abundant. What he doesn't mention and I have observed is the parallel understanding that it is a hostile universe and shit happens. Star blows up and irradiates a radius of a few light years or any number of a myriad of other conditions could go wrong in stabilizing a life-sustaining environment for billions of years. It's possible life is abundant but it is almost always pond scum because something is going to go bad in that neighborhood in a billion years or so.
But I think the big thing is to remember that television isn't real. Star Trek was supposed to be "Rawhide in space" not "100 people in a can for 50 years". Maybe there really is NO WAY to go faster than the speed of light. And space is very, very empty. It's ridiculous to think somebody is going to either "invade" us or drop by on a whim because the energy expenditure is unimaginable.
As for communication, who would know we are here? For one thing, omnidirectional broadcast is insanely inefficient. If by a miracle, some nearby civilization should pick us up from recent decades, it would be decades to return a response.
I'm not at all surprised we haven't been contacted yet. What I am afraid of is that the future is going to see a lot less contact than we would like to imagine. As a Scientific American article speculated, any contact we get will be more like tuning in to a TV channel or an internet communication with a decades-long transmission time.
Humans, the mostly harmless people of Earth who think the 20 light-years is a long way, a billion years is a long time and 1.21 Gigajoules is a lot of energy; planet currently in developmental quarantine status.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
While reading through the numerous comments I only read over the ones that I could see without expanding the threads.
I was looking for someone who stated that they have seen such ETI beings...
But as slashdot is, its the more popular view, right or wrong, that is more visible to readers.
It's not like nobody has seen ETIs as there are plenty who have. From writtings in well known religious books to presidents (Carter for one) to whole cities (Mexico City) and the list goes on and on.
Now we all know that just because you can not prove something happened, doesn't mean that it did not happen.
There may eb a few innocents here on slashdot but they are as rare as finding those whop say they have seen such ETIs. In other words most here know how to lie and in such a manner as to not leave any proof. Actually a Scientist proved this type of cheating is not only real but easy to apply and safe from proof. He wrote the NeoTech reference encylopedia as a result of his research, so we do have the proof of the existence of such cheating.
Now with the advancements of such a class of beings as ETIs don't you think they know how to lie a lot better than us? That they know how to avoid leaving hard evidence around and when they make a mistake and do, they can probably count on human liers to hide it for them (Roswell??)
ARE There ETIs? Absolutely!!!! and the Software Industry would have the users think the ETIs are them....
Lier lier.....code on fire....
We haven't even eliminated this solar system for the possibility of life. There could be "fish" floating around in Jupiter. Magma monsters could be floating around in the mantle underneath us.
The only thing we've eliminated in our solar system is the possibility of life like us elsewhere except perhaps a very small area of Mars.
There certainly isn't any other intelligent life with radio capability anywhere around here though.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I think this guy got it right...
THE ALIEN AGENDA AND THE ETHICS OF CONTACT Marshall Summers at the 2006 MUFON Symposium
http://www.alliesofhumanity.org/ His book 1 is online...
""The Allies make it very clear that we are not ready to establish meaningful positive relationships with other races in the universe. We are much too divided, much too contentious. In an evolutionary sense, we haven't gotten there yet. And that this contact we're having now is premature and it's destructive. We have to get through the great waves of change first. We have to come out much more united and much more engaged with one another than we are today. We are not a candidate yet for interplanetary contact--not with a positive race, not with a beneficial race. And no real ally of humanity would want to have contact with us. For what purpose? They can't give us technology because we'd just turn it into weapons and further prolong our own conflict"
""We don't think of ourselves as living in a Greater Community of intelligent life. We still have these absurd notions that nobody can get here--as if technology in the universe is limited by human understanding."
"But I think what is being presented here in the Allies briefings--the aspect that's a warning--is that the kind of domination that could happen in this world is beyond anything we have ever experienced, ever. We can think of the terrible things we could do to each other and our planet--and, you know, the mind is very imaginative about disasters and things like that--but the reason that I think the Allies are saying this is the biggest problem that faces humanity is that if this occurred there may be no way out for us ever, that the experiment in human civilization and the initial experiment in human freedom and democracy--which has only been extremely recent in human history--I mean we're just taking baby steps here towards the potential for individual and collective freedom--could be ended permanently."
"Because when you have an empire that exists beyond your own world, that requires a lot of management and control. And that the free races tend to be much more discreet and hidden and self-sufficient"
Some areas of humanity are way questioning if such a thing is possible (ETs exist and are visiting us). I think it was Steve Bassett of XConf said the info goes out in 4 groups:
1) Philosophers, exotic thinkers
2) Artists
3) Scientists
4) Politicians
I think more and more info is being dumped into the public arena. UK, France, Brazil, and other countries are dumping their UFO research into the public domain. Some high level people have come out at said it was real. A lot of trained observers in the US military are on record (see Disclosure Project and others). I'm beginning to think this is one of the worst kept secrets the government has. and yes I started listening to Coast to Coast... I am biased, and I know at least off the record some scientists are too. Hopefully more ppl start talking openly about what they know and add that to the overwhelming piles of evidence and credible accounts that already exist.
Hopefully ppl can get over this "Is it real? Do they exist?" soon, and we can get to more interesting stuff like how do we react?
Declaration of Human Sovereignty Regarding Contact With Extraterrestrial Nations and Forces
1) Faster than light travel is not possible
2) Faster than light communication is possible
3) Therefore no alien wastes time flinging bags of animate gloop around the universe - there's simply no point.
4) Billions of alien civilisations have enough on their plate communicating with everyone else who's discovered FTL comms, and negotiating telepresent tourist visas. They aren't going to waste time sending messages in bottles to those few immature civs who still believe that FTL comms are impossible.
5) If you have FTL comms, radio comms are like smoke signals vs ethernet over optic fibre.
6) We won't join the conversation until we discover FTL comms, and then things will start getting hairy. Pandora's box will be a fart in comparison to the atomic bomb of umpteen zillion alien technologies to digest and with luck, control.
7) When we've figured out FTL comms, hopefully we'll be able to withstand the information blow back.
Imagine Europe hadn't discovered America. Imagine umpteen native Americans performing a coordinated smoke signalling effort to communicate with a hypothetical civilisation across the ocean. Imagine Europe happily nattering on mobile phones, completely oblivious to the insignificant impact a little smoke over America has to the sky over Europe.
Trust me, there's life out there, but it's not communicating as we know it.
You know, if we (in biological form) suddenly discovered FTL, found and went to an Earth-like planet, and found a civilization that all looked like your end-point for human development, it's possible we'd fail to recognize that as life. We'd know that there had been life there, but we might not see these self-absorbed computers as anything more than AI left behind by a recently extinct lifeform.
So, yes, if we made that leap in "evolution," any aliens that were looking for us would only find us through our Luddites....
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets.
This is truly an interesting thought-experiment, and one that I'll use in the future. But there's a fundamental problem that comes up anytime you try to antipate either not-yet understood knowledge or beyond-self intelligence - our inherent inability to comment on either.
This results in an interesting negative pattern that's hard to grasp, but after some thought makes perfect sense - people are amazingly bad at evaluating what they don't know.
I wish I could find the reference, but there was a study in England (if I recall correctly) where people were asked to evaluate their own skill level in several, technically proficient areas. And then, they were given tests to identify their actual skill level. And the result was really quite startling: The people who did best on the proficiency tests tended to evaluate themselves as performing the poorest, until the very best of best. And even those who scored highest on the proficiency test rated themselves as less competent than those who score the very worst on proficency.
To put it briefly, the better you think you are at something, the worse you likely are at it.
And this reveals an interesting shortcoming in humanity - our unique inability to guage knowledge/skills outside our personal experience. We really have no effective way to estimate the amount information in areas outside our personal past experience. So in your thought experiment, we imagine seeing the crab nebula up close, as a brighter, sharper, higher-resolution picture of the crab nebula we already know. But since we aren't actually there, we have no idea what we'd actually see there with this newfound resolution, what new, interesting, or exciting developments may exist that we simply can't see. So what we imagine is a higher-detailed picture of the same-old same-old, failing to account for information currently missing. And thus, we utterly fail to picture what is REALLY there, and so your thought experiment consistently fails to deliver what it pretends to - an estimation of what the actual value of an "instant-travel spaceship" could actually be.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
Never underestimate the power of the technology singularity. We are advancing faster every year, and the rate at which our advancement advances also climbs year after year. We are fast developing exo-biological intelligence, and the pattern of our civilization will very soon zip right past the limitations of biological growth.
Plants and trees convert sunlight to usable energy at a very poor efficiency - somewhere around 2%. Solar panels today work at upwards of 18%, and there's no reason to see that trend falter as production costs continue to drop while demand continues to climb. We are in the middle of a watershed event that is just as dramatic and just as devastating as the conversion to photosynthesis and oxygen about 3 billion years ago.
So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chem
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That would seem likely to violate the 'no killing' proposition that pacifism is based on?
What if these are militant pacifists?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Personally, I'm reminded of the attitude of the Daleks from Doctor Who's Evolution of the Daleks - namely, they're pissed because they got stuck on the primitive world that is 1930's Earth.
Why do we assume aliens would be interested in us? We could easily just be yet another primitive planet that no one cares about, like a bad party that no one wants to go to.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Moreover, take a look at Lynn Margulis' work about endosymbiosis. It now seems almost certain that eukayriotic cells (with multiple orgenelles) evolved from far simpler prokaryotic forms. Even those simpler cells no doubt arose somewhat incrementally from "pre-life" chemical reactions involving RNA and proteins outside functioning cells.
What preceded Darwinian evolution proper was indeed different than what you get via transmission of information encoding DNA segments, but it was certainly NOT some "miracle moment". Give a nice hydrocarbon soup a few million years, and some molecular regularities are quite likely to reoccur.
Buy Text Processing in Python
What if we're the first? I mean, someone's gotta be the first. What if that's us? It would certainly explain why we haven't seen anyone else out there yet.
One factor is the time window. We only invented radio about 130 years ago. To any civilization more than 130 light-years away, we're invisible in the radio bands since our first transmissions haven't reached them yet. Our transmission footprint's also interesting. Our output increased steadily up to a point, but more recently it's been decreasing as we move to more efficient transmission methods (more directional signals, tighter directional signals, non-electrical transmission methods like fiber-optics that don't generate RF). By the time we hit the 2- or 3-century mark (measured from when we started transmitting RF) it's likely we'll be emitting so little that we won't be visible to anyone who doesn't know exactly where to look and exactly what to look for. On top of that, we've only been listening for other civilizations in the radio band for about 50 years (a little less, actually). That gives us a 350 year "window". For a civilization N light-years away from us, they have to have invented radio between N and N+350 years ago for us to see them. If they invented it more recently than N years ago, their first signals won't have gotten to us yet. If they invented it more than N+350 years ago, the trailing edge of their detectable transmissions will have passed Earth before we started listening. The same works for us being visible to them: to any civilization more than 130 light-years away we don't exist in the radio bands because our first transmissions haven't reached them yet.
As far as anyone visiting us, I'd say that any civilization that's got feasible interstellar travel going isn't using radio or anything else primitive enough for us to detect anymore. And our solar system is a big place. To see any visitors we have to be looking at exactly the right spot at exactly the time they're there, and we aren't looking at a big percentage of the sky at any given time so it's easy to simply not be looking at the right spot or be looking at it at the wrong time. And look at our reactions to any evidence that might turn up. If I presented a broken plate of metal with a slightly odd composition as evidence of a visit from ET, the instant reaction of 99% of the planet would be to laugh me off as just another lunatic. And were I a visitor from an extra-solar civilization, I'd make sure that I didn't leave anything more than the occasional small chunk of debris or the occasional sighting too fleeting for anyone to get clear pictures from it. Those natives may be primitive, but fission warheads can still be really annoying so it's better to just stay discrete and avoid scaring the natives into doing something rash. Not to mention that if you're seriously observing a culture you probably want to not interfere with it lest you screw up your own data, so any cultural observers would likely be taking great pains to avoid being noticed at all.
I wouldn't be worried about not seeing extra-solar civilizations. My worries will start the day we do start seeing solid evidence of them visiting. Why? Well, based on the record on this planet, those emmissaries are more likely to be representatives of the ET equivalent of the British East India Company than anything else, and that's not likely to be good news for us.
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have
I was waiting for someone to make this fake argument. Tell me, what makes you think that the probability is one in a million, or one in a billion, or any number that large, other than that it makes your conclusion seem valid? You want to make the possibility of life developing an extremely improbably event? Try one in a googol. Then let's see how your argument works: 5x10^11 galaxies (and where did you get this number?) times 10^11 stars per galaxy x 1/10^100. That gives you 10^-77, or, for those of you who don't know scientific notation, five orders of magnitude less than one in one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.
The parent only pulled one in a million out of thin air because it seems like a small number for a layperson and it makes his calculations work out in favour of his opinion. The truth is no one knows the probability with which intelligent life develops in the universe because we only have a sample of 1 (or 0, depending on your view). In science, we see incredibly small numbers all the time, numbers which make 1 in a million seem huge, and there's no argument I've seen as to why the probability for intelligent life to develop should be so high.
I came here for a good argument
The answer is simple, but unpalatable.
Organisms that develop intelligence do so too slowly. The net result is that they get intelligent enough to rapidly use up all the ready resources of their planet, before they evolve enough intelligence to figure out not to trash it with some disaster like nuclear war, greenhouse gases, or simple overpopulation.
The sad conclusion is that intelligence is a short-term win for an organism, but a long-term losing strategy.
What if earth somehow escaped all the galactic wars of the past and we're left is a sterile universe.
Colonizing the universe seems just an extension of our famous Manifest Destiny. Seems a lot of indigenous people didn't like it all that well. Also seems that we have made a rather good mess of the planet we have. Maybe lifeforms that get the ability to travel astounding distances figure out that they ought to respect the places they see, not conquer them. In fact, maybe only lifeforms that get past aggressive colonization survive long enough to travel and see the universe. If you think the humanity has serious problems now, just wait until you are on a teraformed planet light years from home. Before you could survive there you would need to develop the behavioral maturity that would show you how pointless it was to colonize it in the first place. It is quite obvious that mankind should get some colonies living off the planet in case some catastrophe occurs. But, that does not mean necessarily leaving the solar system or the neighborhood. Supernovas can occur but it is also possible to live inside rock.
I think the reason that we don't see lots of ETs is that they figure out that:
There is no place like home
No matter where you go, there you are
Leave No Trace
and a few other things we already know.
I leave it to you to finish the list. We already know what we need to survive on this planet and probably to hollow out an asteroid and set up nice secure colonies. There's just that pesky problem that while we know all this stuff we don't seem to practice it very well.
We are just looking for beings like us (sharing our won world description), that's why the Fermi paradox still works.
The possibilities of what we call 'intelligence' to exist across the universe are small, while the probabilities of a 'real intelligence' that consider us as non intelligent are greater, that is: There has to be intelligent beings in the univers, but we are not on his league.
What's in a sig?
Is intelligent life just a brief transition to a very different form of being? Extrapolating from the history of life on Earth, non-intelligent life seems to exist in a somewhat stable state. Perhaps bacteria-like life is everywhere in the galaxy, and dinosaur-like things are pretty common which gradually evolve for many millions of years without producing human-like intelligence.
But once human-like intelligence evolves, how long does it take until there is a Technological Singularity that causes human-like life to be superseded by some sort of ultra-intelligent artificial beings (that is beings that are designed by intelligent brains, not by evolution)? Humans have only existed in modern intelligent form for about 50,000 years. And now we seem more close than far from truly understanding how our own brains work and building machines with superior intelligence which replicate the key features such as consciousness. As a sort of estimate, comparing our knowledge of neuroscience to our knowledge of physics, perhaps neuroscience is now at about the level of Newtonian mechanics. We know some key principles of how the brain works and can apply them. We know how neurons work, we know major functional areas of the brain, and we have had some success developing pharmaceuticals that tweak the operation of the brain. However there is a lot we don't know (like what is "consciousness", really?). What we need are some major revolutions in neuroscience comparable to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (with perhaps subsequent revolutions of the superstring or grand unified theory variety). It took about 200 years to get from Newton to Einstein, which is a trivial amount of time in the big scheme of things.
So could it be that human-like life usually only lasts about 50,000 years before it replaces itself with something vastly superior? If so, then we should not expect to find extraterrestrial human-like life because the window that it exists is so short. So where then are all the artificial super-beings created by extrateresstrials? Perhaps improbable though it may be, a Singularity just hasn't happened in our galaxy yet, because if it had happened then the super-beings would have rapidly converted everything into matrioshka brains or something, precluding the existence of humans. Or perhaps the super-beings quickly figured out how to slip away into some dimension of space unknown to us, and they are all having a great party there right now. Or perhaps the super-beings really are out there, but we just haven't figured out how to contact them yet.
No-one thinks that the earliest form of life involved DNA (or anything like it). The simplest form of cellular metabolism would basically have been a self-replicating chemical soup that "consumed" chemicals in the environment in order to create more of it's own chemical constituents. This type of self-sustaining chemical microenvironments likely occured all over the place - before they ever became separated from the rest of the environment by any cell-like container.
The earliest cell-like containers may well have been simply lipid (fatty) bubbles that presented a semi-permiable membrane that let certain chemicals thru. These types of lipid bubble could easily have formed naturally (think froth at the edge of the ocean), maybe even based on products of these chemical reactions. There's no need for the earliest "cells" to have been created/encoded by the chemicals they contained as they are today (DNA).
The earliest forms of replication also need not have been self-encoded - they would almost certainly have been due to physical processes - e.g. if you whipped up (sea-shore wave action) a bunch of large fatty bubbles, you'd get a lot of smaller fatty bubbles which would then "grow" via their semi-permiable enclosure letting in the external chemical components that "fed" the chemical reactions. Similar to how an amoeba )modern single cellular organism) "reproduces" by splitting into two.
Highly complex chemicals like DNA or RNA may have have originated as simple chemical catalysts that sped up the reaction process - i.e. guided it rather than being part of it per se.
These types of extremely simple pre-cellular origins are far from being low probabiliy events - they are alomost inevitably going to occur given a rich enouch chemical environment and suitable phyiscal conditions (water, wave action = stirring, lightening, sunlight, etc). If you're interested in the beginning of life at this extrememly early stage, try reading Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe".
Even at this early stage, evolution would necessarily have occured. Among multiple such self-sustaining reactions, those that were best adapted to the environment (those parts of it they relied upon, e.g. available chemicals) would necessarily have left more "descendents" than others that were competing for the same raw ingredients (food supply). With these types of lipid membrance cell, new chemicals in the environemnt that were not part of the chain reactions occuring in the "population" would often have been introduced, and occasionally would have modified those reactions and their products. This source of variation would then have been fodder for natural selection (the winners swamping the losers out of the environment), and so it goes...
The "increasing complexity" argument seems contradicted by the facts (and the reference is to a 10-year-old paper, which is described as "recent").
We like to think that intelligence produces a general sort of fitness, but the all of the primates are extremely intelligent, probably the most intelligent creatures on the planet, and with one exception they all live in highly specialized niches, and they're all likely to become extinct within a hundred years or so.
In spite of what that paper says, increasing complexity does not mean increasing fitness - orchids are among the most complex of flowering plants, but they are also highly specialized and are vulnerable to changes in their habitats.
The one data point we have is that, although life arose probably as soon as the earth cooled off enough to allow it, for most of earth's history, the highest form of life consisted of algae mats. It may be very, very hard to develop even eukaryotic life, and intelligence may require an outlandishly improbable set of events. Hard to extrapolate from one data point, of course.
this always seems to be self-evident to me, that the "first life" was probably not very life-ish at all. little more than a crystal. (after all, they're self-replicating in the right circumstances, right? ;)
http://kered.org
If the development of life were as improbable as you say, you would have to explain why it happened so quickly. As the article notes, life took only 0.6 gigayear to arise after the Earth cooled enough to form rocks. In other words, the average galactic planet is old enough for life to arise ten times over, or more. It would be strange if Earth were the only planet on which life survived and grew.
I think there is a lot to be said for the parent post. Few people give much thought to the possibility that intelligence may not be a viable evolutionary strategy in the long term. Cockroaches and ants aren't intelligent - not like us - but they are far more of an evolutionary success story. Same goes for many types of plants, fungus, bacteria, etc. All of these arguments about why we haven't found intelligent life are extremely androcentric. There is no 'evolutionary hierarchy' with intelligence at the top that all life strives to evolve toward. I see no reason to discount the possibility that uncountable numbers of planets with life go through their entire evolutionary history without ever evolving intelligent life. Maybe the reason that we haven't found any other intelligent life is because intelligence does not give a species a long term survival advantage, evolutionarily speaking. Maybe intelligent life is an evolutionary dead end and we just haven't realized it yet.
others have replied that life doesn't require a cell to automatically spring up, so i'll leave that part. one of the most compelling arguments for 'life' is that of Sol Spiegelman; do some research on Spiegelman's Monster. Richard Dawkins, in his book 'The Ancestor's Tale,' gives heredity as the single defining element of life. as far an explanation for the complexity of what we currently know as a cell, there is an ample amount of evidence for various cellular organs having been created by co-opted viruses. as has also been mentioned by others here, a cell requires a number of different constituents, even without going into things like mitochondria; see Harold Morowitz's book 'Mayonnaise and the Origins of Life", wherein he discusses the role of lipopolysaccharides in cell walls.
in short, life is a fairly improbable event, but its not infinitely improbable. its more like rather unlikely. when it comes to being alone, if you mean what are the odds that there are other sentient beings, its even lower. however, at the risk of veering into the metaphysical, perhaps you should peruse some of Rupert Sheldrake's work; anything that happens once increases the likelihood it will happen again.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
One issue I find of merit that I don't see being addressed is the likelihood of ET life ever becoming intelligent. It seems quite possible to me that the universe is brimming with life, but that evolutionary pressures favoring life as intelligent as ours is extremely rare. Perhaps it is common for life to evolve to an intelligence that is, say on average 30 or 40 IQ points lower than ours. Even if an alien race had an average IQ of only 10 points lower than ours, it would impact the rate of technological innovation rather precipitously.
a) we're not civilized enough yet or
b) you're not in the XT loop
The Fermi paradox is just proof that there are much better forms of communication technology waiting to be discovered.
I agree, after all, 200 years ago, we had no clue about radio transmission and such, as weird of a thought as it might seem to us, maybe there's a few major means of communications we still completely ignore. 200 years ago, if you had wondered how you would communicate between two planets, you would have thought about sending some strong light signal, and back then, we effectively used to communicate using light signals. Now if you look at us, nobody communicates with light signals anymore. We don't know what we may find out in the next few centuries...
Ansible users are at a stage where it probably doesn't occur to them that a culture worth talking to would use electromagnetic radiation as a communications carrier.
Or maybe they have picked us up. Imagine a planet 40 ly away, similar in every point to ours at the same stage of technological evolution. Imagine we pick up radio signals from them. What would we do about it? Nothing, besides send back a message, literally a bottle in the sea.
Here's why, if this twin planet tried to send us such radio bottle in the sea, how would we get them? My point is, that whole SETI thing we're doing makes us thousands of times less likely to catch an extraterrestrial signal of intelligent origin than you would be if you tried spotting a shooting start by looking through a straw in one night. Because that's what we're doing, we're looking at the sky through a straw, a very tiny straw, and even if ETI radio signals were as common in our sky as shooting stars, we wouldn't get to "see" any through such a straw.
You just got troll'd!
Most nations on earth don't allow just anyone to wander across the borders and do whatever they want. If you posit a civilisation sufficiently advanced to cross space and interact with us in any meaningful way, You have to allow that they might be able to 'control' access to that space as well.
Perhaps the most advanced / powerful civilisation in this part of the galaxy has just decided that earth is off limits for eveyone?
I believe the majority of social animals on earth have a concept of territiory - all life competes for resources - so I would think it more likely than not that an extra-terrestrial society would also have a concept of territory.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Given that we've only been producing synthetic radio transmissions for about 0.00000001% of the life of our solar system, it's not all that surprising that we've not heard anyone else's. Will we still be sending those transmissions in a hundred years, let alone a billion? Maybe we'll switch to ubiquitous encryption, indecipherable from noise. Maybe we'll hit a technological singularity and use something currently incomprehensible for communications, and/or move to the spaces in between stars.
And maybe everyone else already has.
So many posts here start with that assumption, with absolutely nothing to back it up. This, on a website whose population is, on average, generally hostile to any religious ideas. Belief in alien life is just that: belief. Don't let your fascination with science fiction ruin your ability to think critically.
The problem might just be that there isn't anyone else out there.
Wolves can show much restraint to other wolves, but little to other species.
We wouldn't be where we are today if we hadn't domesticated hundreds of species of animals. If we just killed and ate them all we'd still be angry chimps.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The Fermi Paradox is very interesting. However it's not the only one. No one ever discusses the other one.
The earth is the one place we know is habitable for intelligent life. Life has existed for over 2 billion years. Why is there no evidence of previous intelligent civilizations on our planet?
Call it Allen's Paradox.
Stephen Baxter's "Manifold" series deals with the Fermi Paradox very nicely, and the second book is all about the gamma ray burst stuff. Highly recommended. He's one of my new favorite authors.
You're thinking in quite a flesh-centric fashion; what of AI's and uploads? Encode your crew in a nice lump of rad-hardened computronium, run them sufficiently slowly that the trip doesn't take much subjective time, and speed them up if a decision needs to be made. Trips home can be arranged by transmitting deltas.
Not problem free, of course, but it changes the economics of the problem somewhat if you're not having to send trillions of tonnes of support equipment, raw materials and so forth to protect a squishy biosphere for millennia.
Would we bother to communicate with ants?
You might if an ant said, "Hey, we're down here. Why not come over to the ant hill and have a chat?"
That would certainly get my attention. But aside from one stupid gold record, we're not doing that. The math shows that they're there and they're here, but they probably also see that we scare easily and are quick to anger.
When we can can mature to the point that we can stop worrying about them eating us, maybe we'll work up the gumption to say, "hello", and then they'll say, "hi, nice to meet you."
My 4-year old daughter has better manners than the People of Earth.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If another race is advanced enough to find us, they are either intelligent enough to remain hidden from us, or they are biding their time for the right moment to move in and reclaim a perfectly serviceable planet from inhabitants who clearly don't appreciate it. A paradox would be a race advanced enough to get here, and stupid enough to contaminate themselves with human stupidity.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Let's assume that civilizations, while climbing up the technological ladder, inevitably stumble upon the concept of Virtual Reality.
Let's further assume, that they master the field to a point, where you can't distinguish it from reality.
Couldn't it be possible, that such a society loses the incentive to do very much at all in the outside world, when the VR-experience can be so much more fulfilling on every level? Could this be the Great Filter - the roadblock every civilization reaches at some point - that simply makes them turn inward and stay and live in "Ultimate Fun Land" (apologies to Iain M. Banks), rather than put up with the trouble of space-exploration?
Sure, there will individuals looking for answers in the real thing, but will they ever reach critical mass in such an environment?
There's another possibility -- which I'm sure is not popular around here, but which is in fact the most likely explanation: Our theories of how alien life might communicate over long distances is very likely wrong. We already know that radio communications are inappropriate. Takes far too long. What certainty can we in fact assign to the idea that we fully understand all of the possible communications mechanisms when in fact astrophysicists continue to be surprised on a weekly basis by space observations? Take an honest look at the predictive track record that mainstream astrophysicists have. Subtract out all of the theories that were created after the observations were made. Look just at the mainstream theories' predictive capabilities, and ask yourself: why are we still being surprised by enigmatic observations? Predictive ability is really the only honest assessment of the theories we have. If we aren't exhibiting great accuracy with our astrophysical predictions, then we should not consider our theories about alien communications to be even more accurate.
The real problem is that people here, and within the field of astrophysics, would generally prefer to not consider something like that. There is a general aversion to thinking that we might have made mistakes in our own mathematical modeling of the universe -- so much so that we would prefer to postulate invisible matters and forces are causing the things we see with our telescopes.
Furthermore, pseudoskepticism is taking an increasingly prominent role in science these days. It's becoming instrumental in deflecting attention away from anomalous data. The existence of a possible answer that conforms to mainstream views is now sufficient to ignore the fact that many of these anomalies in fact formulate a cohesive story. If you dismiss each of the individual anomalies on a case-by-case basis, then you can easily miss any fabric that might connect them together. Pseudoskeptics have taken over wikipedia and have long ruled this forum here. Finding a place where evidence that clearly contradicts mainstream beliefs can actually be discussed in a rational manner is becoming increasingly difficult. Evidence and prediction are losing value relative to consensus. If we allow this transition to continue on its current course, we will convince ourselves that we've figured everything out before we actually have a theory of everything. We can quite easily cause ourselves to ask the wrong questions under these circumstances, and a theory of everything -- as well as alien communications -- will seem forever elusive. Make no doubt about it: our own perception of our own accomplishments plays a very prominent role in our ability to solve these sorts of problems.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Maybe we are the self-replicating probes.
DNA is a late comer. Before that, we think primitive organisms used RNA as a code instead of DNA. We think this is true because the oldest DNA based fossils are the Stromatolites, mats of cyanobacteria which date to about 3 Billion years. From there back to about 3.5 Billion back, the various trace fossils remaining are thought to be mostly RNA based life.
DNA is an advanced replicator. The sort of DNA found in eubacteria is more advanced (in that it has some additional error correction mechanisms, meaning it does a more reliable job of copying itself. DNA in multicelular organisms is more advanced still - in fact it can be argued that sexual reproduction, putting the reproductive organs deep inside a parent so they are protected from some chemicals and radiation, and many other evolutionary advanced are all about improving copying fidelity.
Lower mutation probability seems to be something nature is heavily selecting for (which makes sense). Lower mutation probability actually increase the evolution rate (which seems counter-intuitive, but which is just what modern Biologists such as Dawkins will claim, that is lower mutation rate = increased selection rate is the orthodox version of the theory I'm presenting, not some crackpottery. I can go into why this is, but I'd rather people read Gould, Dawkins, and others for themselves and get it from the horse's mouth).
So if modern DNA evolved from more primitive DNA about 1 Billion years ago and Earliest DNA about 3 Billion years back, what happened before? RNA seems to takes us back to about 3.5 Billion years, so given the age of the earth, we have to squeeze probably at least 5 sequentially more primitive replicators, maybe many more than that, into that first 1/2 billion years that are left. Plus, each step back means sloppier copying and a slower overall evolution rate, so each step is more 'miraculous' than the next. (I'm not claiming an automatically supernatural explanation here, just saying that the probabilities seem to be getting really incredibly unlikely, reaching odds of billions to one and then zooming up into really improbable odds, on a par with all the air molecules in the room just happening to all jump to one side type events, when we talk about the first few steps from inorganic clays with various crystaline microstructures to something a little more like a true self replicating molecule).
Now this talk about the 'soup' behaving like it's gonna evolve automagically is another thing. When people run experiments with glass globes full of Methane and Ammonia and electrical arcs and UV for energy sources they very quickly get Amino Acids, usually within a few hours, which is where these 'soup' claims start. But when they first did these same experiments the researchers assumed that they would see Proteins within a few weeks or months, and that part just didn't happen. Getting from Amino Acids to self replication turns out to be Quintillions of times or more harder than these early experiments suggested. Saying that self replication might be a mysterious property distributed throughout the 'soup' as a whole is just another way of ignoring how long the actual hard data tells us those odds are.
Something is fishy as hell with the whole origin of life question, and not just with the Fermi Paradox. Darwin himself knew it - that's why he carefully titled his first book "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Life". By his own writing, he thought he had explained why life, once started, divides up into species and why the fossil record shows species have changed, died out, or been replaced by new one species, but he didn't think he had solved the more ultimate origin problem as well, and in fact thought his theory might pose whole new difficulties in solving it.
Huxley's related book "On the Origin of Species, Or, The Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature", is mostly where people get the idea tha
Who is John Cabal?
Whoops! In the last part of the first paragraph, I think I meant to say "other evolutionarily advanced traits" or something like that. Sorry!
Who is John Cabal?
Creationism is an important aspect of this discussion and shoud not be modded off topic.
For myself though, I try to see the world as closely as it appears to be, rather than through the interpretations of men. We discuss here things on a cosmic scale perhaps beyond human imagining and I am comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with speculating on the whims and motives of beings divine as I am certain that is beyond my ken.
Of this I am comfortable though: to describe a thing as being something other than what it clearly is can almost always be considered a slight to its creator. It is beyond me to speculate about why a creator would make the world appear to be one thing and then require his adherents to insist it was another. That sounds to me like a cruel game and even less likely than intelligence as random happenstance.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why do so many people on these forums obsess about conflict? Do any of you posters ever feel like going into bad neighborhoods to hang out? Gee, why not? Our planet is the bad neighborhood of galactic civilization. Once we clean up the trash (pollution), fix up the infrastructure (build spaceports, house our own people), get rid of the drugs (mostly alcohol, or the concept of immoderate consumption of any kind), prostitution (fascist/corrupt politicians) and violence (war, military rulers), they'll be happy to see us. Oh, and we'll have to get rid of the insanity too (wacky religions of all stripes).
Why does it never occur to people that all sentient races go through several stages before they're going to be welcome on the scene? Ours isn't ready yet.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
"That's the Sagan argument."
c osmic.html
Hmmm. Only partially. You don't go far enough. In Sagan's Dragons Of Eden, he shows that the extreme amount of time between now and the big bang is more than enough for entire civilizations to have flourished and died out. Hell, it's happened on this planet. Both of our civilizations would have to exist at the same point in time, and be close enough to each other in order for the popular concept of "aliens" to occur.
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/astro/act2/
Sorry...I don't buy the self-replicating probes bit. Reminds me too much of Star Trek's "V-ger."
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I thought everyone knew that we are looking into space for signs of intelligence because none has ever been found on planet earth.
In Sagan's Dragons Of Eden, he shows that the extreme amount of time between now and the big bang is more than enough for entire civilizations to have flourished and died out.
Sure. But it only takes one with expansionist desires to fill up the galaxy in a handful of million years. It may even happen over and over. But the point is that life here wouldn't exist if aliens kept taking over the planet before life could start. And if aliens had been coming here (over and over, perhaps), it seems logical that we would have *some* evidence of it. But all the fossils seem to show that life evolved here from very simple organisms, and not from an alien source.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'd check out Uranus.
- Alaska Jack
PS One thing I can guarantee about the next billion years: That joke will still be funny.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Eventually a species progresses to nanotechnology, then Transhumanism (or Trans-whatever-the-hell-they-are, to be more precise.)
Once you've done that, you probably don't NEED anything to survive that is detectible over interstellar distances. And if you do, odds are it's so big a project that it ends up looking natural, or is too big or too advanced to be detectible by our primitive detection methods. You might not even need a "civilization" per se other than for intellectual stimulation - if you even need that.
Michio Kaku has pointed out that we could easily be like ants living next to a superhighway. How aware are ants of the technology next to them?
And exactly HOW are we trying to detect ETI? Listening for RADIO signals? Bitch, please...And how complete a scan has been done for other methods of detecting life? What percentage of even the Milky Way galaxy has been thoroughly scanned using the most subtle methods of detection possible for us? I rather doubt any scientist would responsibly claim we have done enough to determine the issue one way or the other.
The Fermi Paradox is basically a skeptic's attempt to derail any speculation that humans aren't the top of the food chain - as are all the attempts to suggest that the universe is too hostile to life which makes us the lucky winners...
Personally, I think it is likely that a protohuman evolved here and got intelligent before the protohuman that became man did. I think that species developed nanotech as little as a few centuries before our recorded history began (which would explain a lot of legends about advanced civilizations in some religions). With ubiquituous nanotech, they could have erased all signs of their previous existence and technology easily. By now, they would millions of years ahead of us in technology - all the while still permeating the Earth and near space, almost completely indetectible to us. This would explain all the UFO and assorted other paranormal phenomena humans have experienced for thousands of years. These entities would be so far advanced from humans as to have little or no interest in us, other than recognizing us as conceptual processing entities.
I would expect any other advanced species from some other star to be in the same state.
As someone once said, "The gods will not speak to us face to face until we ourselves have a face."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
There is a scary possibility, look at our own inability to get fusion to work, oil/chemical energy is ok to just get a civilization started but to go from star to star you at least need fusion. In fact each planet might only get one chance because the first civilization could easily use up all the easy to reach oil and coal. If the first civilization dies off, the next one to come up has no easy to use starter energy to run their technology long enough to even get a shot at researching fusion. For example the hot, jungle like conditions that created our oil and coal might never come again. It's possible that there's is no way to get fusion to work. So everywhere in the universe are lots of civilizations that then have energy crises and either learn to live efficiently (using piddling fission power, wind, and other renewables) or just die off. This makes them much harder to detect. Even without fusion, it might be possible to go from one star to another very slowly via advanced fission propulsion (taking centuries in slow boats to go from one star to the nearest star with robots growing the crew as the ship approaches the target star out of frozen ova or some other even farther out nanotech method) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rock et
but doing that just clones your power starved civilization on another
star and doesn't solve the energy problem. The only thing it really
does is reduce the chance that one disaster will wipe out your only
planet.
Mark
Thank God that we *are* war-mongering bastards or you'd be writing your shitty little post in German instead of English. Thank God that we had a president who was willing to kill enough of the other side to make the *real* slaughter stop.
Illiterate and ignorant fools like you disgust me. Your historical perspective started the day you were born and it shows in your utter arrogance and stupidity.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In case somebody is looking at us, I'm sure events like this one left some of their astronomers pondering:d /Castle_Bravo_Blast.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5
My bet is they will try to work out why a solar system with so few asteroids and comets, would see a large quantity of impacts, on a single planet, over such a short time period. ; )
Run the numbers. Your premise is wrong. We have as many high power broadcast stations as we ever did. The number of 50 KW stations in the US (largest licensed power output) has not gone down. The number of 100 KW stations in other countries (largest licensed broadcasters) has not declined either. The number of mid power broadcast stations has climed over the entire world. The number is still rising. The total radiated power used in radio communications other than broadcast has also continued to climb. Ask any radio astronomer. We are currently broadcasting Gigawatts into space. Soon it will be 10s of Gigawatts.
What you do see is that there are more small broadcasts. 1 million 802.11 base stations is still a Megawatt of broadcast power. the real number is probably closer to a Billion than a million. Also, in the earlier times you referred to, lower frequencies were used. Most of those are trapped inside the ionosphere. The higher frequencies we use today go right on through. Earth as seen from space is continuing to get noisier in the radio spectrum.
What was once Kilowatts is now Gigawatts. From a distance, of course the separate signals are all smeared together. That's what we'll see. Not a single signal, but a large radio noise source. We have been brighter that the Sun in the radio spectrum for quite a few years, and we are still brightening. That is the type of signal we should be looking for. We can figure out what is being broadcast later.
We should be looking for their domestic broadcasts, because that's what we'll see. They don't know we are here.
It'll take a very large array to resolve individual broadcasts over interstellar distances. We don't have access to such an array for checking random signals yet. We should be looking for any anomalous radio signals. Any star that is 'brighter' than it should be is a candidate. Frequency doesn't matter so much, volume does. Frequency shifts on the order of months would indicate that the source is in orbit around the star, like we are. Like us, they will be smeared out over the whole HF to near infrared part of the spectrum. Expect the whole planet to be radiating. individually Signals will be generally small, but some will be very large. One clue is that it won't look like a black body radiation distribution pattern, nor will it be a single sharp frequency like some naturally occurring radio source. It will be an anomaly.
We can build a receiver able to resolve individual signals after we know where to look and what to look at. Right now, we don't even know what the receiver sensitivity will need to be in order to resolve any of the separate signals. Then we MIGHT be able to separate out the strongest broadcasts. It will probably take a space based set of radio antennas with a baseline of tens of thousands of Kilometers. A system like that wouldn't even fit on the Earth. we'd need to isolate it from our own generated noise anyway. It does no good to try to receive and filter/translate a billion independent transmissions at the same time.
We should also expect the decoding time to be on the order of decades. After all, we are likely to be listening to an internet where we know none of the encodings or standards. We are also not likely to be getting complete transmissions. We will be seeing parts of files only. The Rosetta Stone was simple by comparison.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
It's also worth considering that given that our planet is an ideal location for life to develop how many times has life developed here? Seems like just the one time. Maybe life is a lot rarer that we assume.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So why has it only happened once on Earth? I think quite likely is optimistic. We know it happened once, because it happened. But that doesn't mean it's likely. In fact given that it's only happened the one time you'd think that would indicate that it's quite unlikely to happen.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Earth, however, seems to be the only planet condusive to intelligent life in this star system, to the best of our knowledge.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This is one angle I hadn't considered in my post. I'll concede this point. Although farming creatures to kill are a renewable resource, new and different wild game is a sport some individuals in an advanced civilization might enjoy. Extensions of this concept apply, and alien angles beyond what I imagined. Another poster mentioned backups, but I doubt the occupied -> vacant ratio of livable planets is so high that eradication of us as pests is an efficient solution to this problem.
Not to be pedantic, but mass is energy. That the Oort cloud is rich in hydrogen for fusion and known to have scattered mountain sized collections of frozen hydrocarbons is just bonus. To get manned craft beyond Saturn we would need fusion power at least, or some other as-yet undiscovered fount of energy. Even for unmanned craft that we send that far we use fission.
As another poster pointed out, yes, this brings us back to the question of where are they? Perhaps in the coming decades we will come to see that we've already seen them, we just didn't know how to read the signs. Perhaps the noisy phase of social development is brief enough that no culture passed through it close enough for us to see it, in the brief span we've been looking. Perhaps we are alone for now. If we take the obvious step and expand our sphere everywhere we can, we won't always be. Eventually the lines will diverge enough that "we" will be "them". Space is vast, and after Saturn the landmarks are far apart.
It bothers me that we can't see ion drives in the distance. That must mean the technology is short lived, soon to be surpassed by more efficient means. Otherwise potential alien intelligences would be shifting lunar sized masses with it, and we could see that from a galaxy away.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years."
You missed Fermi's point. They should be here NOW. In fact by conservative estimates it should be hard NOT to find them as they should be everywhere. The paradox is that if they exist at all they should be here in numbers to large to miss.
It's the same way you can prove that time travel can't work. If it did we'd see time travellers from the future. We don't see them.
How long will it take us humans to explore the entire galaxy? Really not as long as you think. What you do is build a self-replicating robot. Send only 100 of these to 100 nearby stars. Each of these robots sets up a robot factory and sends hundreds of copies out. These do the same. In less then million years every star will have an army of robots. You don't need ultra-fast space travel either 1/10th of the speed of light is enough that by now the galaxy should be full.
Many people think that these robots are the dominate form of life in the universe. We have been walking upright on Earth for maybe a million years but in less time those robots could far outnumber us.
If robots (Either with good AI or maybe with biological minds downloaded into them) are common they don't need to live on a planet. They could be happy any place there is enough energy and raw material.
... and if there were as high chance as 1 in a million you would have expected life to have developed multiple times here on Earth. There should be some chemicals making the jump from amino acids to self replicators right now in some slime pond somewhere.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
o Out of the Silent Planet
o Perelandra
o That Hideous Strength
--Basically, our world is so f'd up that the other intelligent species can't really have much to do with us.
--There is Hope, tho - Big Changes(TM) are coming $soon...
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
One thing that needs to be considered is distance.
(a) the cosmic speed limit: radio waves will move at the speed of light.
(b) spherical waves lose intensity by the inverse square of the distance from the source.
The blogger laughed off the rare Earth problem, and he shouldn't have. As long as it's sufficiently difficult to setup the right conditions to have life, it will be likely that other intelligent life is too far away to broadcast signals powerful enough for us to receive.
There is a rating of technology levels of civilizations based on how much power they could harness. It's called the Kardashev scale. You would have to be able to harness the power of an entire sun or an entire galaxy etc for the different types. The further out you look the more advanced on that scale a civilization would have to be for you to receive a signal from them. I don't think that technology advancement is always increasing. It will either plateau or collapse. Extinction or population control are more likely than galactic colonization.
But what if there are civilizations out there like that? What are the bright objects that we can see at high redshift? Quasars and grbs, how hardcore does a civilization have to be to harness that much power? And why would they use it to send a postcard? It's not as if our governments are spending a large portion of their budgets on SETI, so why should we assume that other civilizations will be any different?
Thanks, Tom ;)
Seriously, WheelDweller is on the right track. See his post here for a good thought.
I contend that a relatively _HUGE_ friggin' moon is required to stimulate the evolution of "life as we know it," due to the effect of tidal forces in "stirring up" the oceans, where life "as we know it" inevitably must begin. And we know that a moon as large as ours is, to say the least, unusual. And that's only one factor. Are there (many) more?
When I was a child, I thought like a child, etc. And I thought there _MUST_ be other intelligent life in the universe. But now I'm a man (who's putting away childish things), and I think I better understand the real truth. Part of that truth is that Fermi may have been horrifyingly correct. We may be alone in the universe. As I said, horrifying -- and humbling.
sigfault (core dumped)
Pehaps you should be looking for a bigger sphere....
With the star inside it, not outside.
Rethinking email
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.... No. Intelligent life is utterly certain, but we are still alone in the universe. I do not accept that intelligent life forms are too 'intelligent' to come near us. Religion, wander-lust, desperation, navigation bungles. There are lots of reasons for life forms to turn up here. The paradox is real in the sense that there appears to have been plenty of opportunity for someone to have visited. The error must be in the mental framework we have of earth-like planets in lots of places, for millions of years. It cannot be true. If the universe began as a quantum event, and we in a time twisted way are the observers of the event that creates our particular universe, then we are a necessary event. But according to these quantum theories, (and I'm ignorant of any detail), a successfully created universe is an improbable event. That is, there is only one likely observer per universe. That 'observer' can be a species, so there are lots of us, but we are all the same. Just one observer. That is a possible explanation for the paradox. It is not watertight. The observing species should be able in time to spread, lose contact, and then re-discover its relatives. So I also accept that it is likely that the universe has only recently ceased being hostile to life like us.
Glad to see everyone has solved the Fermi Paradox just by reminding us that space is big and by quoting Douglas Adams ad nauseum. Guess we can close the book on that one. No Python references for us? I think that would sew it up tight.
Sarcasm aside this thread has so much supposition about the intelect, ability, advancement, logic and morality of any possible alien life it's mind blowing, and not in a good way. I don't think we can presume to understand an alien intelligence even if it did show up.
I've read some comments that proposed that if an alien life form advanced enough to actually mobilize the technology to reach us that they would be so intellectually superior that they would have no interest in us, or at least no malevolence towards us because they would be so enlightened. That's a massive guess that puts a lot of faith in the development path of "intelligent" life. If you think of Humanity as a possible median point for cruelty and benevolence (as we often paint ourselves in Sci-Fi), that still leaves a lot of terrifying room for a bad encounter.
Anyway tl;dr it's a paradox. It's genuinely weird. There's no simple explanation. Space is big, but life should be plentiful if the explanation of abiogenesis holds (local chemicals spontaneously live). It should be plentiful if the explanation of exogenisis holds (space junk has space mold)? Dammit it's just weird!
-- The unsig...
Because they would have filled the galaxy by now. The galaxy is OLD, and a self replicating probe would fill the galaxy in relatively short order, even at sublight speeds.
Provided that one model of the inevitable course which all civilizations must absolutely follow is true. Since we don't see the postulated results of that model we can conclude either (1) no civilizations exist within the galaxy, or (2) the model is wrong.
It's all guesswork at that point but having seen plenty of pretty models shot down over the years I'm not really inclined to be too impressed with this one negative result.
That old argument? Who do you think you are? You're a better thinker than Carl Sagan, Enrico Fermi, and Frank Drake? You're allowed to voice your (layman's) opinion on the subject, but, jesus christ, it would've taken all of four minutes of research to find out that your thought is entirely unoriginal and answered in various ways by geology and biology.
It's probably good advice that, when you think you've had an original thought, you should smack yourself and call yourself an idiot for being one, because you never will have such a thing.
Simply, it could be that life HAS come into existence multiple times on Earth. Perhaps geological evidence of early life was wiped out by the seas of lava which once comprised the young Earth. Or maybe it's just that the conditions on Earth have changed to make life substantially more difficult to arise. I just don't understand why you think you've all of a sudden come upon the greatest argument known to man for whatever it is you're trying to argue, just because it sounds good to you at the time. If you really thought about it, you'd come to realize how dumb that is, and you'd probably do research to find better answers. Then, maybe, just maybe, after many, many years of research, you'll be able to have an original thought, and be able to wear a badge that says "scientist." But you're not going to get there by being presumptuous and pretentious.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
Let's assume earth is a typical intelligent-life-bearing planet of average age in the universe--even that's a stretch--we might well be the farthest along in the MIlky Way for all we know. Assuming the evolution of life on Earth is representation of the evolution on most other planets that means most other life giving planets have life no more advanced than we are here. And we have made only paltry communications--mostly all limited to our sola system. Assuming most other life-bearing planets are no farther along, their communications are no better and have not come close to reaching us or ours them. We and they have a long way to go before we ever have even a remote chance of detecting one another let alone meeting. Fermii's fault lies in his assumption that other life forms are more. While he might assume a bell curve with our advancement at the middle thus assuming more advanced life, he has no evidence whatsoever for that assumption. Our advancement might be 3 sigmas out on the leading edge meaning we are one of the most advanced at this age of the universe. So Fermi's paradox is not one at all. It's a theory in disguise--it states then that Earth, as an advanced life bearing planet, has a life form (humans) that are one of the most advanced in a galaxy for this age of the universe. I don't have no more trouble assuming us 3 sigmas or 20 sigmas out as Fermi does assuming we are at the mean. In fact, the evidence is on my side. Once one looks at it my way--there is no longer a paradox at all.
You seem to lack even a basic understanding of biology. I really hate biology, but even I learned enough in highschool from a very anti-evolution Christian fundamentalist teacher in an ultra religious town while being religious myself to known that not all life has nuclei.
"There should be some chemicals making the jump from amino acids to self replicators right now in some slime pond somewhere."
They also have to out-compete the already highly competitive life forms that natural selection has manufactured into being. Not to mention find some spare resources to do it with that are not already part of an existing lifeform.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Provided that one model of the inevitable course which all civilizations must absolutely follow is true.
You made one crucial mistake in the above... it doesn't take "all" civilizations, it takes only one. Only one civilization has to either want to expand throughout the galaxy, or wants to create self-replicating probes to explore the entire galaxy. Assuming intelligent life is relatively common, do you think it's reasonable that not one over the last few billion years would do it?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There is a middle ground. Self-defense. Being an absolute pacifist is not a winning strategy as is being an absolute aggressor. Unless one can be 100% sure of being able to defeat any possible opponent, now or in the future, or 100% sure of being able to hide your nature from any other outside organizations.
An advanced civilization that went around trying to conquer/destroy/assault other civilizations for whatever reason would very quickly find itself a target of other advanced civilizations if only so that those other races could ensure their survival by taking out a hyper-aggressive race that might try to assault them in the future.
It would seem to me that the best policy would be to walk softly and carry a big stick. Long term survival is MUCH more likely if a civilization treads the middle ground between "doormat" and "belligerent asshole." Even if other races have wildly different philosophies and world views, it would seem like being a genocidal asshole would be extremely bad.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I forgot to mention that in 65 years of life I have as of now, never had to pay anybody to fix anything, not a boast, it's true!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
They are there. We just don't recognize the magnitude of the effects that they are generating. Perhaps "dark matter" is really their technology used to retain matter around a galaxy.
It seems like the common assumptions in the discussion are:
1) that technology will make everything possible given a long enough period of time.
2) Other species will develop the same technologies.
3) Other species will have the same desires as we do.
I see a lot of these assumptions should be looked at more closely.
For example, some of us aren't that confident in technology solving every issue. We are on a collision course right now with ourselves, in my opinion. If I were asked to assume that life would develop in a similar way as we did, then I would say that the reason we don't run into them, is that they don't survive long enough to get to other solar systems. I certainly hope that we don't make it.
I am reminded of the famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi. When he was asked what he thought about 'Western Civilization' he said he thought it would be a good idea. I hope that contact doesn't happen in my lifetime at least. *shudder*
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
You're confusing 'evolution rate' with 'selection rate' - they aren't the same thing.
Plus, each step back means sloppier copying and a slower overall evolution rate, so each step is more 'miraculous' than the next.
That has to be backwards. Look at viruses based on RNA (like HIV) - they reproduce so fast and have such a high mutation rate that they constantly develop new varieties within the same host.
the researchers assumed that they would see Proteins within a few weeks or months, and that part just didn't happen.
Many of our assumptions have been shown to be wrong - not that long ago organic compounds were thought to only come from living things, proving that life can't come from non-life. Then it was shown that that's the easy part, the hard part is forming the more complex stuff.
In the end, you're just saying that because some proponents of abiogenesis made one assumption that turned out to be wrong, your ad-hoc, gut instinct guesses have to be more correct - which is silly.
I'm sorry, should have written nucleus/nucleoid. Are you happy now, or does the additional membrane of the nucleus change the whole argument?
The GP said he thinks we're alone in the galaxy, not the universe.
If the chance of life developing in a given solar system is one in a million, then 5,000 systems in our galaxy will develop (or have developed) life. How likely is it that a tool-using, intelligent species will develop where life has developed and make it past the problems that could result in their own desmise?
We could easily be the only intelligent life in our galaxy, because in galactic terms, a one in a million chance is large. Everything hinges on what conditions are really needed to support self-replicating organisms, and it could easily be that such conditions are very hard to find. The universe as a whole is generally an incredibly hostile place, and it would be wise to not forget that.
Finally, remember that the problem of travelling between the stars is nothing compared with the problem of travelling between galaxies. If you think the distance between stars is large, you haven't seen anything yet. Travel between galaxies is, to a starfaring civilization, roughly like travelling between the stars is to us (a civilization that's capable, with effort, of travelling between planets in the solar system).
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
That's all fine and good until some alien civilization builds an army of self-replicating robot cannibals.
On a more serious note, I see a fatal flaw in the "self-replicating robot" theory. I'd bet that it would take a pretty massive investment in money and resources to do this, and the technology to do it is probably at least several centuries away.
But even if it were possible, why would anyone do this? I mean, I could see investing in something like going to the moon or mars, where we would get results within our lifetime. But history--especially recent history--has proven that humans just aren't much up to the task of doing something that will only reap vaguely possible benefits generations down the road.
Something like this could never happen until all wars have been stopped and the entire world is peaceful, hunger has been stamped out, disease has been eliminated, and every person on the planet is brimming over with wealth and joy. Why? Because if there's so much as one hungry person on the planet, there will be a lot people who think that sending out self-replicating robots that we'll never hear from again to be a colossal waste of money that could be spent on better things.
It's the same reason why we'll never build generation ships. Very, very few people are going to agree that it's a good thing to build a massive (and very expensive) spaceship to carry a bunch of people off into space never to be seen or heard from again in their lifetimes unless, of course, they're one of the people who get to go.
But it is rather difficult to "see the world as closely as it appears to be", with disregard for "the interpretations of men", without coming to the conclusion that it, and in fact the whole universe, revolves around you (the observer).
A good point, but consider going two steps further: how can anyone truly "clearly" see, never mind accurately describe, a creation, if that individual is not the creator — who could be said to have "described" it via his creation?; and, how can the thing created truly "clearly" see (and thus accurately describe) itself, never mind the entirety of the creation of which it is part?
(There are Biblical, and presumably other religious, statements that raise these same points; they are thousands of years old!)
Start with a safer assumption, which I touched on above: nobody in this world can really "grok" the entirety of the world, never mind the universe. They really can't even understand, or clearly see, themselves. (We still don't really "get" how a dog, a gecko, an ant, or even a paramecium, actually works, never mind why any of them exist.)
Given that, we really can't reason from how the world/universe "appears" to us, because we don't understand us, and the vast majority of what constitutes said "appearance" consists, for any particular individual, of information obtained "through the interpretations of men".
That suggests our biggest challenges will involve our "fights" with ourselves and our interactions with others. This shouldn't be surprising, considering that, even in the comparatively-simple world of Newtonian physics, the "N-body problem" is considered very difficult to solve — yet each "body" is obeying very simple and well-known rules, when compared to how any living organism (from a virus on up the so-called evolutionary, and complexity, ladder) behaves.
Next, is there any truly persuasive evidence that our Creator requires us to insist the world is something other than it appears to be? I'm unaware, offhand, of any evidence that Jesus Christ, or certain other well-known "Men of God", insisted on any such thing, or required their adherents to do so to others.
That leaves us with a somewhat-less-controversial, but perhaps-even-more-interesting, question: why does religious teaching generally dissuade us from probing, contemplating, and even worshipping the fullness of our physical universe, and instead focus on teaching us how to treat other people, animals, and our environment?
There's a reasonably scientific answer to this, one that I think becomes more rational the more we learn about our physical universe: the universe may be vast, but it is not, from the point of view of any individual who is subject to religion teachings, consistently important across all of its "components". (I.e. there's insufficient "spooky action at a distance" such that we really need to know what's going on in Andromeda.)
Simply put, whether
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
And they're low power digital frequency hopping radios. The frequencies overlap and in the aggregate, interfere with each other. From the moons of Jupiter with the best equipment available to us they're indistinguishable from background radiation.
The point is moot. It's not just detection of weak remote radio signals. If the rate of expansion assumed in Fermi's Paradox held true we'd have found local artifacts from alien civilizations right here or on the moon at least, at most they'd have colonized earth back before the dinosaur era and we would be pets if we existed at all. Other civilizations would, after all, have had at least a 4 billion year head start and galactic conquest should not take more than 0.025% of that time.
I'm liking the other post that linked to a .ps theory that said gamma ray bursts have been smacking down the rising intelligences and the declining rates of GRBs enable us (and other evolving systems) to achieve sentience across the galaxy simultaneously. The race is on for galactic conquest! Let's go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What has originality got to do with anything? Who cares about originality, this is just a discussion, and a slashdot one at that.
Yes, perhaps life has evolved many times but through some process(es) *all* the evidence has been removed. Perhaps... but if we're talking one-in-a-million chances you'd expect to see that life on Earth to have multiple origins, rather than the single origin we seem to have.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Consider that in 400 million years the slow expansion of our sun will render earth inhospitable to multi-cellular life. And the earliest life is now believed to arisen almost 4 billion years ago, but the earth is only 4.5 billion years old. So intelligent life arose after 4.49 out of 4.50 billion years with 0.40 left to live, almost so late in the game it didn't happen! Most life gets eaten by the parent star before it can evolve far enough to become intelligent.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
First, whoah, you might want to dial down the dosage just a bit.
To me I appear to be the center of the universe for a number of reasons. In most accepted models, the edges wrap and so every point is as much the center as any other. Like all of us I suffer from the subjective point of view. I won't apologise for this - it's not my fault.
Your views antagonistic to doctrine and dogma, I don't share them. Others don't believe as I do, but I believe in the power of their faith to shape their world for them. Your mileage may vary. Certainly your beliefs don't seem to be leading you to a happy place. You may want to consider the benefit of that.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Look how short our own species' attention span is. We can't even follow divine marching orders without an endless forking of opinions on what the orders were and how they should be undertaken. How long would our species dedicate itself to such a dubious goal of colonizing the galaxy for the sake of colonizing the galaxy?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And as for the probes, hopefully everybody out there is asking whether it is safe. At best it would strip the galaxy of its harvestable resources. Even if they don't mutate, you'd eventually be plagued by a galaxy full of hungry probes looking for planets to gobble up.
Heh. Maybe our great^n grandchildren will sustain their lifestyles by shooting down the hordes of their ancestors' probes seeking to harvest the earth, and scavenging the minerals and power supplies that the probes brought home from distant corners of the galaxy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ben Bova, a major science fiction writer, has a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox that startw with one of the side-effects of general technological advancement: The average person (of any intelligent species) acquires more and more power to do things. Well, on Earth it is well known that not all persons are emotionally stable, even as adults. Why should an assumption of stability be made for other worlds? Remember that if there is a technological cure for insanity, it is beyond our current technology, and it is reasonable to assume that another species at our technological level will also lack that technological solution. Which means plenty of wackos running around out there with power to do stuff, just like here. And what can one empowered insane person do? How about write a software virus that destructively disables a key technological infrastructure? How about recruit others into a terrorist organization that acquires nuclear weapons and starts a world war? How about create a biological virus that results in a deadly worldwide plague? Bova basically says that after a certain technological level is reached, every global civilization gets murdered from within by some insane individual or group. So nobody ever reaches the stars. Even if some social "cure" is tried, like totalitarian testing/execution of people arbitrarily defined as "insane", likely as not either of three things will happen. (1) They don't catch everyone who wants to destroy civilization. (2) They encourage ordinary folk to resist being part of such a culture, leading to destruction of the civilization. (3) They succeed, but as a result of having clamped down, become a "water empire", and end up not wanting to go to the stars.
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
I don't understand this... Because they aren't building replicating probes to conquer a galaxy??
Would that even be our humanity's motives if we get their technologically? We don't even want to fund space science well to find out!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
We think we can't see God, so we decide there is none. But we wonder why we can't see ETIs, so we invent reasons.
All very ironic, especially when the answer to both questions is basically that we can't see the forest for the trees.
joudanzuki
Those probabilities are hard to guess. I doubt that the colony ship will ever happen because it doesn't seem to offer much of a ROI; OTOH I suspect that there will be many times over the next hundred years when a psychopath releases a bug with the intent of killing everybody.
And then there are the nutcases who are actively trying to set up WWIII because they think it will help Jebus get back sooner.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My pure guess is that life originated somewhere else in the galaxy and some proto-stuff survived on an asteroid/commet to land on a very early earth.
Basically for the reasons you stated. Life appeared on earth almost instantly it was possible. It has taken 25% of the age of the Universe for that early proto-stuff to be come self-aware and advanced enough to understand a reasonable fraction of the Universe.
My guess is that we're alone.
How long did it take Thomas Edison to master the bulb under which you probably now sit?
You are assuming that there is not some reason for pacifism that is apparent (and compelling) only to species that are much more intelligent than us. Perhaps it is a form of pacifism that is based on tit-for-tat-type considerations, and pacifism as a more optimal game strategy. Perhaps above a certain threshold of intelligence, the things that motivate us and cause us to be aggressive seem like the concerns of flies fighting over a piece of dog shit.
Also, if the first technologically sophisticated species that managed to spread thoughout the universe turned out to be pacifist, then powerful aggressive species would not be permitted to develop to the point that they posed a legitimate threat. If we were pacifist (not to the point of never being violent but in very strongly preferring peace), what do you think would happen if chimps started approaching us in terms of technology and still showed very aggressive tendencies? To assume that a violent species would ultimately get the upper hand implies that they could hide their aggressive intentions for eons while they catch up to the more sophisticated pacifist species.
This is only valid if there is an infinite increasing advancement in science and application possible. I never understood why people can think this is probable. More probably there will be a point where advancement go against the limit of what is biologically and physically possible, measurable or doable. This make far more sense than science allowing incremental enhancement for ever.
This asymptotic point would then be where all civilization comes to the same amount of technical advancement. In other word, a civilization 10K or 100K older than another one would not have much more advancement than a more recent one if both are near the asymptote.I am not saying that WE are anywhere in view of the asymptote, we might actually still be far off, I am saying that potentially older civilization might already have reached it.
In such asymptotic case you then have two situation :
1)the limit of the asymptote is above & beyond what allow a civilization to explore the universe/galaxy, then it is really strange we did not see anybody yet.
2) no matter what the asymptote bind us to our own solar system or maybe 1 or 2 solar system away. Self reproducing probe, arch, are a dream beyond the power of any civilization.
Despite all what we wish, point 2) might actually be more probable than we would like. And this would both neatly explain WHY we never saw anybody or anybody will ever see us, despite the universe being teeming with life.
In other word, the universe would be an infinite series of isolated island of life.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If there are in fact countless intelligent civilizations out there, then the most intelligent ones (that have control over time+space, etc) will surely still want to be entertained, and that means they'll first visit the civilizations that are slightly less intelligent than them.
Of course, plenty of new civilizations will evolve to that interesting level continuously, so that should keep the ones at the top entertained enough to stop them bothering with civilizations that "can't handle the truth" yet.
I'm pretty sure everyone here will agree we're average at best, and more than likely just bottomfeeders obscured by the ocean of slightly more advanced civilizations above us.
I would say that ETs are pretty much the same as we are (I do not mean the lookout, but the character). ... Because the laws are the same all over the Universe (at least this is a general assumption), thus the alien species would be subjected to the same evolution conditions, which are: large variety of species concurring for limited resources, so they would end up with pretty much the same characteristics as we:
Why?
- agressive, and cooperative at the same time
- having universal limbs, so rather they would be land "forests" animals, not marine
(I am of course referring to time travel into the past, beyond the development of time travel, with the ability to affect and alter that past. Other modes of time travel tech are certainly conceivable.)
sigs are hazardous to your health
Whether there are or are not other life forms out there is in a way irrelevant. It merely points out the awesome responsibility WE have as a specie to grow up and behave ourselves. Let's assume on one hand, we are it. Then we have a responsibility to grow, explore, multiply, learn, and generally "be excellent with each other". Let's assume on the other hand, we have company. Then don't we have the same responsibilities? David
What about the signals we sent to communicate with the Apollo crew (since the apollo 8 orbit of the moon and the other landings) we had to comunicate with the astronauts and that did make us send radio signals into space right?
:)
What about the signals we're sending to the rovers on Mars? They're powerfull. Are they directed at Mars only or are they traveling until the depths of space?
Are these signals encrypted in such a way that would look just like noise if anyone else picked them up by accident?
If any expert is in the house, feel free to answer
rm -rf /home/leia
Intelligence in a species is pathological. It inevitably leads to the death of the species in short order. There may even be evolutionary, genetic checks on the development of intelligence--in which case, we somehow got off the reservation and went intelligent contrary to those checks--maybe even a unique event in this universe. End of Fermi Paradox.
E Proelio Veritas.
The Great Filter (Drake's equation) teaches us that the number of other intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy alone is expected to be anything from several to tens of thousands at any given time. This equation is I think from the sixties. But Fermi could do his maths and figured this number during the war already. What Fermi's paradox teaches us is not that we are alone, but that something is preventing us from seeing it.
An unspoken assumption that seems to run through all these arguments is that our 'intelligence' (and by extension ET's) is some kind of unlimited capability to understand the universe and turn that knowledge into technological tricks that make interstellar communications and/or travel steadily easier, faster, and cheaper over time, without limit.
But why should that be? Can anyone imagine a herd of horses ever understanding the universe well enough to do calculus and build spaceships? No matter how long the species endures? We think of the intelligence of horses as a strictly limited capability: like the speed of cheetahs or the strength of elephants, it will get you so far but no further. There are things that are forever beyond the mental ability of horses.
Why not humans? What makes us special, compared to other animals with a brain? Why should we be uniquely positioned among all animal species to understand everything about the universe, given enough time, and be able to develop technology to do arbitrarily wonderful things?
In short, consider the possibility that the human species is today -- or perhaps, at most, will be within a few centuries -- just about as advanced as it will ever be. That whatever civilization we can construct by, say, 2200 AD is going to be unchanged in essential capabilities in 22,000,000 AD or 2.2 x 10^9 AD, and that whatever understanding of the universe is required to communicate or travel over interstellar distances might be as much out of our collective reach as would be interplanetary travel for rats.
This is normally a taboo area for me as the tirades from the 'see no evil' brigade are normally more then I can stomach and aren't worth the time, however I have to say that from what I've read there's fairly significant circumstantial evidence that would imply they're already here and have been for quite some time. I don't necessarily believe that we're in contact with aliens but at the same time I can't prove otherwise. A theory has to be disproved or discredited before it can be discarded. Some of the people in the following links make some pretty big statements and the 'official' response is normally petty personal and defamatory attack which leads me to be just a little suspicious. Why deride someone when you can prove him wrong with fact? From what I've seen over the last decade regarding the BS media and outright lies from officials and governments I think if I had to I'd side with the ufoligists when it comes to trustworthiness. These are some of the best links I've found... anywayz as they say, The Truth is Out There. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=us er.viewprofile&friendid=62955347
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
http://ida.wr.usgs.gov/html/m15012/m1501228.html
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS 15-P-9625
I for one, bow to our new Panspermia Overlords.
Now go wash your hands.
.
- aqk
F U
It would seem that the slashdot crowd is heavily invested in the idea that the universe must be populated by intelligent life. Personally, I am not convinced. By the way how can you call the guy "self centered". Is it more self centered to assume to are allow or to assume that the universe is teaming with being like us? What is so special about intellgence? Is intelligent life really a "higher" life form then unintelligent life? What is the evolutionary advantage?
Intelligence is expensive from an energy stand point, but traditional darwinian theory doesn't explain the evolution of intelligence. Intelligence doesn't really provide much selective advantage. Look at the bacteria. Bacteria exist in pretty much every ecological niche (on Earth) we have ever bothered to look for them. The biomass of bacteria outweighs primates many times. Some day when we are all gone bacteria will still be here.
My opinion is that we haven't encountered any intelligent life because it is very rare. There is not a strong evolutionary reason for it to develop. I am confident that bacterial life and pond scum is pretty common in the universe. Intelligent life? It is rare enough that we may be the only example.
> Evolution favors a combination of aggressiveness and intelligence.
:)
Then how do you explain cockroaches, phytoplankton and sponges? What, you think they're "less evolved" than we are? That's nonsense! They've been evolving for just as long (longer, depending on how you measure)--they are extremely evolved! The most populous multicellular creatures on this planet (by sheer volume, not just numerically) are ants and termites. And while some of their behavior may resemble what we call "intelligence", it is clearly hard-wired, not learned. And while ants are usually fairly aggressive, termites are not so much. For a more obvious example, a little closer to home, consider the field mouse, an immensely successful species, but neither intelligent (at least for a mammal) nor aggressive. In fact, aggression is most strongly associated with apex predators like that wolf you mentioned. And while apex predators are really cool animals in general, they also tend to be extremely fragile as species.
I might go so far as to say that the available evidence shows that Evolution (that famous anthropomorphic personification who lives in a house made of giant tortoise shells, decorated with finch feathers) disfavors aggressiveness, and seems to be fairly neutral about the whole notion of intelligence.
Of course, when it comes to intelligent, technological species, well....we're speculating based on a sample-size of one, which is not enough to form any sort of meaningful conclusions. I think it's fairly safe to say that evolution will favor intelligence when designing intelligent, technological species, but beyond that I hesitate to guess. I also think it will tend to favor hair when designing hairy species.
I like Charlie Stross's solution to the Fermi paradox, as proposed in "Accelerando" - basically that as a civilization becomes more advanced and reliant on technology and bandwidth, they're less willing to leave to go out exploring. Sort of the why-leave-home-all-my-stuff-is-there theory. So we haven't encountered intelligent life because everybody out there decided they were going to stay close to home.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Maybe there IS no way to travel quickly in space NOR is there a way to suspend people. There's no real reason to assume it's possible.
Past that, I kinda like the one Stephen Hawkins (I think) put forth - once a civilization becomes advanced enough it inevitibly blows the planet up with either some experiment OR because it's become to easy to make nukes. Consider what the world will be like in let's say 50 years - it will be EASY for every third world wanna be power to have a nuke. How long do you REALLY think we have before either a madman or, more likely, a group of religious idiots (you know who I mean) decided to detonate a string of nukes in Europe or the US and render a good portion of the planet uninhabitable for a while....That'll pretty much end the space program.
It's coming. Which is why you people BETTER get your heads out of the sand and stop bitching about the US. We aren't the real problem no matter what you think. We are the only ones keeping the lions at bay. Bitch, moan, you know it's true.
The real problem are the mad men and religious zealots that think dying is a good thing.
Picking up Greg Bear's book "Forge of God".
There may be a very good reason everyone isn't noisily babbling out there.
I have no
So how do they explain the existence of celery then?
Yes, but if you and a hundred thousand of your friend all had spaceships, and 100,000 years, your progeny would number in the hundreds of trillions and you'd have colonized the entire galaxy. Which is the point of the paradox, populations grow exponentially, so where are they?
My preferred explination, c really is the universal speed limit.
try to think of a color that you have never seen. Impossible huh? I believe that humans do not have infinite imagination. All inventions, theories and discoveries, have always existed, we don't have the capability to create something that doesn't exist, only to change what already exist. No one has really created anything, they simply were exposed to the right pieces of information and were able to put them together in a novel way. So following that logic, every invention is a refinement or restructure of prior ideas.
Following that logic the only limit of science is the size and complexity of the universe. It seems like a really big and complex universe, so I don't think we will run out of science anytime soon.
It's all about finding better ways
I don't understand this... Because they aren't building replicating probes to conquer a galaxy??
Pretty much. In the timespans were talking about, *someone* should have tried to reach the nearest stars, or sent probes to do it, which through geometric progression, should have explored the entire galaxy.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Not sure any species would be both capable of that and at the same time insane enough to stay dedicated to a million-year plan.
Put it this way: did humans "stay dedicated" to a 10,000 year plan to explore the earth? No, people just naturally did it, once they get tired of where they were and wanted to go somewhere else. Once a race has successfully done it once, why wouldn't they do it again? And again? And continue generation after generation for millions of years?
And even if they didn't, once you launch a self-replicating probe, you wouldn't necessarily have the goal of exploring the entire galaxy, just the local star systems, and "whatever else we can get back". But eventually, the probes *would* make it through the entire galaxy, even if that civilization ceased to exist.
I also like the theory of an AI-enabled probe that seeks out and communicates with other civilizations, then beams back what it learns. I think it's inevitable that we'll have that sort of technology.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The Great Filter (Drake's equation) teaches us that the number of other intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy alone is expected to be anything from several to tens of thousands at any given time.
The Drake Equation starts a discussion. It wasn't meant to really calculate anything. It's simply a way of describing the probability factors, but we have absolutely zero clue what the probability factors really are, especially the probability of intelligent life arising from base life.
In any case, that was Sagan's argument, and the Fermi Paradox firmly asks, if there are so many, why the hell don't we see ANY evidence, when logically they should have spread everywhere in the vast amount of time of the galaxy?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If a civilization has solved the technical problems involved in interstellar space travel, they have no need for planets. They may not even want to get very far down into a star's gravity well.
What makes us think that any sufficiently advanced civilization would resort to communicating with something so primitive as radio waves?
Two crickets are talking in a bar. The first cricket says, "What do you think of those big hairless apes lumbering around?" The second cricket replies, "Can't be too intelligent; they never stridulate by rubbing any appendages together."
Suitable stars with suitable planets for the development of intelligent life maybe very very rare.
I've always believed that aliens do exist and that they're aware of us and have merely cloaked themselves by removing themselves from our perception. Logically, it'd make sense. The easiest way to do prevent primitive civilizations from accessing technology they're unprepared for is to hide it from them. And the best way to do it is to prevent them from noticing anything of the sort exists in the first place. Wouldn't you agree that if you don't want someone to read a book, the best way to do it is to gouge the person's eyes out and then not mention the book at all? All of that matter that we know is out there but can't perceive, the fact that quantum particles alter their behavior when we observe them, both evidence that my conspiracy theory may hold weight. It'd be an awesome test too to see if a civilization is worthy of joining the Universe. If we crack the cloak before the planet gets annihilated we deserve to be recognized. If we don't, we're little better than sludge anyway.
In base 3 the longer gaps are just repeated smaller gaps, in base 2 the dahs are repeated dits with no gaps between. Since it's just an on/off signal, though, base 2 probably makes more sense than base 3.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
If extra-terrestrials do exist out there (which they probably do), the question is more likely "Why would they even bother with us?" Honestly, if they have solved mortality, interstellar travel, and a slew of other issues that it takes to become a space-faring race, why would they be interested in us? Even mild scientific curiosity can be satisfied by scooping up a few of us and dissecting us.
Reasons to Visit Earth:
- Humans make fun pets. ("Look, dear! Talking monkeys!")
- Curious as to what humans taste like.
- Anal probes are the equivalent of interstellar cow tipping.
- Human horn is an aphodesiac.
Reasons Not to Visit Earth:
- Same reason a level 70 in World of Warcraft avoids starter areas. There's no point.
- Stupid humans keep wanting the ET's to just solve their problems for them.
- The last guy that got stranded in Roswell was carved up like a turkey.
- Same reason why humans don't bother to explain how microwaves work to dolphins. Sure they can talk, but they don't understand a damn word we say.
I think we would have noticed them by now if they were heavily established in our Oort cloud: their infra-red would be very noticeable.
Uh, I'm still looking for 95% of the universe,
has anyone seen it?
You assume aliens would be no more advanced than we are. However, even a thousand years (trivial on the cosmic scale) makes a huge difference in the technological scale. Consider that 1,000 years ago the deadliest fighting force was a man in armor on horseback. A single infantryman today, armed only with basic gear, could take out a hundred knights. A well-equipped squad of 10 could take out a hundred thousand or more- certainly more than enough to break any 10th-century army they fought against. And that's without giving them tanks, ships, or aircraft. That is the difference 1,000 years makes. Our world appears to be billions of years old, and our star one of trillions. Even if there are only 10 other civilizations in our ~10-billion year old galaxy, we would expect at least one of them to be at least a billion years more advanced than us. Saying that we are the most advanced civilization out there is saying we are probably the only civilization out there.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Funny how God is the last explanation anyone is willing to entertain regardless of how much a stretch the alternative is.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
... on MySpace.
Believe it or not, the USA indeed is a problem because of its addiction to cheap oil, gas and energy. And the USA knows this and sometimes acts against it.
The USA is not even addicted in a good way, because the energy isn't used to fuel a spacefaring program, it is consumed by SUVs and air conditioning. In this respect, the USA will be the reason why some aliens will wonder about the fermi paradox.
Moreover the whole strategy might not work forever, since counter effects like the trade balance add up, and when it stops working, who can tell which state will be the one with religious zealots and the centralized government with the grip on the economy?
On the other hand some people should be thankful that the USA is facing mad men right now. Which again doesn't mean that the USA can wave the "mission accomplished" flag, because structures unlike those the USA is wishing for are intact in both countries currently in focus.
To go into more details, and more paranoid details:
When USA think tanks view the world as a chessboard, the strategic locations are seen as those with oil, providing a dangerously simplified view of the world.
When the US drafts more wiretapping laws and directives giving more power to the president, then maybe one reason these pass is that some who are rich will at least partially favor a strong central government by friends of religious zealots, because it is one way to be one with the people, or simply put, it gives votes. It also might be seen as providing cultural coherence.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
As it turns out there is a 1:1 relationship between gods and planets, so 1 god per planet. It just turns out our god is a little smarter and less lazy than the other gods. For instance, the closest any other god has gotten to creating another Earth is our god's brother, Hank, who just finally created the chimp.
There's a tendency to think that the way we do things is just the way that things should be done. But there are many ways life can develop, many ways life can be supported, and many, many planets that are much too far away for us to observe or for them to observe us.
Maybe the ETs out there with the probes are looking only for Jupiter-type planets, and are ignoring Earth- and Mars-types.
And parsimmony would keep the number of large, major limbs small. Heck, most species on Earth that went bipedal started losing their forelimbs when the uses evaporated. T-Rex, various flightless birds, etc. Pretty much just tree climbers retained the forelimbs in conjunction with a (mostly) upright posture.
So don't expect too many intelligent civilizations based on 6 or 8-legged designs, to say nothing of hundred-legged ones. There probably aren't that many large animals with those designs (also presumes intelligence requires something roughly on the size of a human, or at least no less than a small dog or so.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Which brings us back to...
What if their self-replicating probes' payload was code-named "DNA"?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Several things could happen... First off none of this will happen for this century or next
1) People wil be a LOT richer. 100 years ago the average american workers could not own more than a few shirts now because to automation he can have a closet full. This is simply the result of worker productivity divided by the population. We are seeing trends already in some selected types of good like computers where costs are going down. Clothing prices took the nose dive last century. Eventually all manufactures goods will be built in "lights out" robot factories and will cost only the raw materials and energy costs. It may take 250 years but eventually it "stuff" will be cheap and we will be able to afford whatever we want. This has been the general trend for over 2,000 years. It's likly to continue
"Why is the interesting question. Why send stuff off when the results will not come back in your lifetime. only two reasons I think: (1) "lifetime" may be radically re-defined in the future. We would not even think about sending machine out to explore the galaxy before we can build very intelligent machines. Once we have such machines perhaps it is them not us that wants to go on the long trip. (2) if you can build a robot that can build a robot then building 100 robots is not such a massive undertaking, very few labor hours would be needed. (3) if it were cheap enough SOMEONE would do it just because he can. Maybe an artist thinks of it as a kind of "Performance art." and many of us like to build things that will out live us. Rich people have been building things that wil "last forever" for a long time. First the pirymens in egept and latter tings like the Getty Trust or the Carnegie Endowment.
Generation ships? The way these will happen is some day people will live in space in some kind of large self sustaining kind of structure. There could be hundreds of these structures. One day one of them will decide to hurle itself outside of the solar system. They may not even miss the Sun and the others may not even care that they leave. People on Earth will not build and launch these. They will be launched by the people who have already lived in them for generations.
Have you ever owned a sailboat? A sailboat is not "transportation" because "you are already there". You live on the boat so the fact that it is going some place out on the ocean is secondary. It's not like you've left you house to spent time in an airplane to get some place. No, sailing is where to slowly move your house at about the speed of a slow jog (3 to 6 knots is typical)
Back to Fermi. Even if a few cicilizations send just a few of these the entire galaxy would soon be full. It would not take billions of years.
About the "where to go" problem: Today you've have a problem. We have no idea where to go but that is changing quickly. Just as soon as we can get some better instruments up in space that problem will be solved. It's a problem we can solve with time and money, no breakthroughs in physics or science required.
What if their self-replicating probes' payload was code-named "DNA"?
Two problems with theory: 1) we have a huge fossil record that doesn't seem to indicate that (we have RNA appearing to predate DNA, and why would they send such primitive organisms?), and 2) It'd be a useless experiment, because nothing is reporting back to them about the solar system. What's the point?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Many people's concept of aliens involve creatures just a little bit more advanced than we are flying in on chunks of hardware and occasionally crashing. If there are aliens out there, then their technology would be sufficiently advanced that we wouldn't even recognize it as technology, any more than someone 200 years in our past would be able to puzzle out the purpose of a microchip.
One of the most fascinating (and mathematically sound) predictions about the future of technology involves the exponential advancement of our capabilities (think Moore's Law). Once computers hit the level of human processing capability, the exponential rate has the potential to increase exponentially as those who are designing the next breed of thinking machines get exponentially smarter. This could very well result in processing power that would provide every human on the planet with more thinking capacity than all of mankind currently has, and it could result in it well before 2100.
There are many avenues that mankind could reach once that hits. It's not impossible that any mechanism capable of producing intelligence that powerful is incapable of being un-ambitious enough to self destruct. As our intelligence increases, so does the destructive power of the individual. Right now a couple of ambitious individuals can kill a few hundred with ease. What happens when we become smart enough to design viruses that can kill people and not just computers? If we limit the technology to a select few, how do we prevent those select few from succumbing to in-fighting, with the unselected as both prizes and pawns?
Another avenue involves transcendence. Having the capability to understand everything down to its tiniest particle, a universe without surprises may very regularly result in any race that achieves intelligence transcending beyond the physical world.
There are many, many ideas of what might happen when our intelligence is boosted well past our own, but none of them involve us seeking out new civilizations to share our new found godhood with. Call it two hundred years between when we understand the concept of other star systems and when we no longer find other star systems interesting. The probability of two such civilizations peaking out at the same time is phenomenally small.
Isn't it a little naive to think that such an alien species might be spewing out massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation, just in case someone's listening? I mean, yea, we speak to our plants every now and then but we don't expect them to hear and understand, much less reply.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Survival, if not for them, then for their makeup. They knew their time was limited; perhaps their sun was developing the rattlings of a nova. Rather than sending out one giant, fragile ship holding their entire civilization, they decided to sent out a trillion probes in hopes that a few would survive.
On a cruder level, maybe to sow their wild oats on a galactic scale. The drive to reproduce is what fuels evolution, after all.
OK, so maybe I don't believe that, either. I just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for spreading your genetic information than just direct personal benefit.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They knew their time was limited; perhaps their sun was developing the rattlings of a nova. Rather than sending out one giant, fragile ship holding their entire civilization, they decided to sent out a trillion probes in hopes that a few would survive.
Personally, if I were doing it, I'd send out human DNA, not just raw primitive cells and then hope something develops intelligence similar to what I was...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
That's just one of the problems, the human race is completely obsessed with getting things now. We (as a whole civilization) don't just want to know if there is life out there besides us, we want to know yesterday, and we bloody well expected a phone call last month also. Thus we can logically conclude our own impatience to know such things is another problem. Perhaps in our haste we may have over looked the obvious as well?Sure, with so vastly many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to see the haystack.
Not just that, if you really look at it we could say that we are a needle (Earth) in a haystack (our solar system) sitting in a very large field (the Milky Way) trying to find another needle in another haystack that may very possibly exist in another field... And from one bacterium (what else would live on a needle?) to another, I'm not sure if I want to know if other needles exist... Much like those people on Krikkit, perhaps it would be just too much for our little molecule minds to handle thus resulting in our own development of cosmocidal tenancies. Disturbing to say the least... Let me know if anybody has noticed fewer dolphin about lately, if so I need to get my towel.I've never seen that scenario in a newspaper or history book...only fictional novels like Hitchhiker's Guide.
All war is for resources and religion. I think at least half of the 'religion' wars could be linked back to resources. The ruling body of power in some alien civilization sees that there once abundant supply of energy is about to run out, especially if there populations keep growing. So they send large portions of their population to war with a distant planet. The reasons they give to their people might be anything from 'go secure more energy', 'they need our help to become a galactic democracy', 'they have WMDs', or 'God commanded it'...
However, for a technologically advanced-enough race, it would be very little trouble to wipe us out and take our resources...even if they were miniscule in the grand scheme of the Galactic Empire. 100 miniscule planets may be just what the Galactic Empire machine needs to keep running.
Suppose they have all the energy they need. Most species that we call animal on our planet, have all the food and water they need, but fights erupt over mates or power. The aliens may want our women!
Fragility? Robustness? Unknown destination conditions? Maybe I'd make something that could potentially evolve something that might have some of my faculties if that's the best I could do.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yeah, it would be a shame if it took roughly 3.5 Billion years for life to eveolve from single cellular forms to roughly human like intellegence, only to have the star go boom and wipe the slate clean. I have heard that life can live on Earth for another billion years or so before the sun either gets too hot or too cold. Note that the Earth is always moving in a larger orbit each year fromt he sun and the sun was a lot dimmer 3 billion years ago, maybe the orbital "decay" of the earth will add some extra protection from slow expansion of the sun, if not there is always the solution of a technology driven society to use asteroids that are steerable by Ion rockets over thousands of years to steal orbital energy from the Gas Giants and add that to earth, pushing it eaven further out there over millions of years, protecting it from the sun heating up. With that level of tech though you can build colony ship to protect yourself against the end of the sun.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I don't think folks understand hard nanotech and escalating computer intelligence.
... and nothing. We've been around, say, 50,000? and within say 200,000 more, we'll be reforming the whole galaxy.
...)
What will you do when you have the ability to create a robot that can self replicate?
What would you do with Mars if you could fire a self-replicating robot there with a mission to terraform it?
What would you do with the Alpha Centauri system if you could fire off a self-replicating robot there with a mission to collect all matter there and package into nice, habitable earth-size planets?
What would you do with systems at the edge of our galaxy if you could fire off a self-replicating robot there with a mission to collect all of the matter and build massive computers and defense systems to intercept incoming self-replicating robots.
I have to believe that within the next thousand years (barring catastrophe or unbelievable self-control) we will develop:
1. Self-replicating robots
2. Spaceship drives that will be able to accelerate, if not us, then self-replicating robots to near the speed of light.
My point: A galaxy is like a pile of oily rags for intelligent life. Once intelligent life begins, it will consume the whole thing before another spark spontaneously begins. The dinosaurs were around for millions of years
Personally, if I were looking for signs of intelligent life, I would be looking for stars and or galaxies disappearing.
*
(We are the flame
... "So, where is everyone?" To which I reply: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemists"...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If aliens visited us any time before 100 years ago it would have been written off as not happening. Aliens could have visited us 100s of times over the past million years. If they were spotted, no one today would believe it today. Perhaps there is an interstellar red light that has kept aliens from passing by for 100 years. Without them getting close we would likely not be able to detect them.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Has anyone thought about the possibility that space is not as empty as we think, and that it is only in the presence of a strong gravity well that high speed travel is possible? If you're going to run into a micrometeorite the size of a grain of sand at .1c you might want to make your interstellar spaceship hull out of unobtainium, or at least fire something at it to knock it out of the way.
Does it matter how many possible planets could support life? That seems to make the origin of life like the infinite monkeys + typewriters = Hamlet idea. Just because life has happened once doesn't provide us with any information to calculate the likelihood of it happening somewhere/time else.
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
Fermi's Blunder? Hmm. A bit overstated don't you think? Fermi's Overestimation maybe. You might want to read up on Fermi's Paradox. The observations you made have been debated in detail over the past 57 years. Whatever you want to call it, even with the things you mentioned, it isn't an easy effect to simply dismiss out of hand.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
No. And I'm quite familiar with the whole thing, thanks.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That has to be backwards.
In the end, you're just saying that because some proponents of abiogenesis made one assumption that turned out to be wrong, your ad-hoc, gut instinct guesses have to be more correct - which is silly.
There's one ad hoc, gut instinct guess between both our posts. Guess which person's it came from.
For the last time, Dawkins, Gould, Morris, and essentially all the most respected biologists writing for the popular press have said this. So have more scholarly authors such as Mark Ridley in college textbooks. If you have a problem with it, you're the one disagreeing with 99+% of all modern biologists.
You know, there is an explanation for your incorrect claim about viruses. I could tell you, and if a third party posts to this thread asking, I WILL GLADLY TELL THEM WHAT IT IS AND PROVE MY CLAIM. I won't tell you - you're a crackpot who disagrees with the established experts and because of that resorts to personal attacks - you can stay stupid as far as I'm concerned.
Who is John Cabal?
At least until the first time someone in one of those virtual universes builds a quantum computer and runs it, then they blow the stack.
Yes, under the right conditions, but you're extrapolating far beyond the realm in which this concept fits. Even after some reviewing, I'm going to have to stick with the idea that, in many cases, higher mutation rates don't lead to slower evolution. Hell, as another random counterexample, some bacteria deliberately increase their own mutation rate in order to adapt to stressful conditions.
I could tell you, and if a third party posts to this thread asking, I WILL GLADLY TELL THEM WHAT IT IS AND PROVE MY CLAIM. I won't tell you - you're a crackpot who disagrees with the established experts and because of that resorts to personal attacks - you can stay stupid as far as I'm concerned.
And I'm the crackpot? Sheesh! Good luck to anyone else who replied to you.